by Sue Miller
What he was really concerned about, he said, was the very good chance that he was going to be sent to Vietnam. She was lucky she was a girl, he said, not to have to think of these things. And Nina said yes, yes, she was certainly lucky, she knew that was true. After a while she pretended to sleep again.
Later Columbus began, and was reassuringly like Chicago in its outer stretches—the black neighborhoods, the sturdy, squat houses and apartment buildings. But then she was shocked by the downtown area, which was shuttered and deserted. Blocks of storefront windows were blank, or backed with ripped paper, or soaped. Here and there was a spot of neon, a bar. But there were no restaurants, no hotels, none of the life Nina thought she could step into.
The sailor’s sister didn’t want to leave her at the station, wanted to wait with her. Nina assured her her brother would come. He’d told her he had an afternoon class, but he’d be there, that she was just to wait. The sister was a fat woman, friendly and loud. She insisted on giving Nina her telephone number, just in case.
After they’d gone, Nina asked the man behind the ticket counter if there was a Y or a cheap hotel nearby. He barely looked at her as he recited in a monotone, “Gorham Hotel two blocks south on Summit.” His pointer finger lifted in a minimal gesture. “YWCA six blocks west on Broad.”
Before she left the station, Nina took all her change and fed the snack machines. She bought two dry-looking sandwiches wrapped tightly in cellophane, a package of potato chips, and several candy bars. She put them in the top of her suitcase and went out into the deserted streets.
Nina walked slowly to the Gorham Hotel, stopping to change hands on the suitcase several times in each block. The hotel’s lobby was large, full of empty orange plastic chairs arranged in rigid rows, as though someone were going to show home movies. It smelled strongly of Lysol. No one was at the desk, but there was a doorway behind the counter, and from somewhere in the space it opened into, Nina heard a TV, and voices. When she rang, a woman’s voice called out, “Give me a minute.” Nina set her bag down and waited.
The woman who finally appeared behind the reception desk was middle-aged, but she wore her hair in a strangely old-fashioned, tight hairdo that looked like something out of the 1940s. She had on a kind of housecoat with bright flowers and birds printed on it. She was smoking a cigarette, and she looked startled to see Nina. “What do you want?” she asked.
“I need a room for just one night,” Nina said.
The woman looked around the lobby, then at the streaked glass doors Nina had entered through. “You alone?” she asked.
“Yes,” Nina said. “I’m moving to Columbus, but it’s too late today to find an apartment.”
The woman squinted at Nina through her smoke. “Yeah,” she said after a while. “Okay.” She pushed the register across the counter. “Sign in,” she said. “It’s four bucks.”
Nina signed the register Liddie DeLacey, in a careful handwriting not like her own, and fumbled in her purse for the money.
The woman’s eyes were steady on her the whole time. When Nina laid the money on the register, she scooped it up and tucked it into her pocket in one movement without lowering her gaze. Then she gave Nina the key and told her where the room was. She was putting her on the second floor, she said, because the elevator was temporarily out of commission.
As Nina started up the stairs, the woman called out, “Honey?”
Nina turned. The woman was standing in the open doorway that led back to wherever she’d been when Nina arrived. Her eyes were slits looking up at Nina. “Put that chain lock on your door before you go to sleep tonight, okay?”
Nina nodded, and the woman disappeared.
The next day, Nina found the bus that went down High Street toward the campus of Ohio State. Slowly, as the number of stores increased, as they became more and more the kind of stores that might support student life—record shops, pizza parlors, an army-navy store—she began to feel reassured. At the end of a long block that had two houses with Rooms for Rent signs in their first-floor windows, she pulled the cord and struggled off with her suitcase.
An elderly man answered the door in the first of these houses. He seemed completely incurious about any of the story Nina had worked up—a new lie, about being a part-time student at the university, the first in her family to go to college. He just wanted it clear, he said, standing in the hall, that she couldn’t have men in her room, that she couldn’t cook up there. That she couldn’t play a radio. The rent was fourteen dollars a week, payable in advance.
Nina was so grateful for the ease of this that she didn’t ask to see the room, and so she was stunned when he led her upstairs and into what must once have been the master bedroom of the house—a huge room with high ceilings. It had a bay with three windows that nosed out over the yard into a tall bare tree. She was thrilled, too, to see that she had her own marble washstand in a corner of the room, though the toilet and the tub, he told her, were down the hall. It wasn’t until after he left her that she noticed that the bed, an old iron camp bed, sagged luxuriantly toward the middle. That the carpet was filthy and stained. That dust balls roamed freely across the floor and the sink dripped steadily. When she went to the window and moved the curtain back, her hand came away feeling faintly greasy, and the dust motes danced wildly in the still air for a moment.
She yanked open the sticky bureau drawers and began to unpack her bag, neatly arranging the underwear, the socks and tights, the sweaters. Then she folded the covers back on the bed. She looked hard at the pillow and the sheets. This was what she’d been afraid of, she realized: that the sheets would be somehow vile. But although they were worn—actually darned in a few spots—they were clean. And when she lay down, the air that stirred around her head smelled reassuringly of strong bleach.
Nina lay in bed for a long time. Sometimes she slept. She thought about Philip, about his worshipful attention to her, the way he smelled after they’d made love—she’d only slowly realized that the smell was partly hers. She woke up and washed her face, then lay down again. At one point, staring at the grayed, cracked ceiling, the light ebbing outside, she thought, Now: now her mother was beginning to worry, now she was calling Stephanie’s house. In the gathering dark in her room, she stared up, open-mouthed, and tears of pity and self-pity began to form.
She was hungry, she realized. She took a twenty-dollar bill from her wallet, then looked around for a place to hide the rest of her money. She tucked it, finally, under one edge of the rug, first pushing aside the sandy dust that lay evenly distributed on the worn dark wood.
She walked four blocks down High Street, until she saw a five-and-ten. She went in. There was a lunch counter, she was relieved to see, just as there was in the one on Fifty-third Street. She ordered French fries, two hot dogs, and a Coke. She ate slowly. The counter woman stood watching her from the end of her work space, and Nina felt that the sound of her own chewing and swallowing were explosively loud. Before she left the store she bought an alarm clock, soap, a plastic soap container, shampoo, a glass, and, at the last minute, Mademoiselle. Her change was $7.27.
She walked slowly back, looking at the stores, thinking of employment, of how it would be to work here—in a record store where a young man maybe Philip’s age was sorting through the bins. Or here, in a pizza place, where the sign on the door gave the hours—noon to midnight daily—and the old man kneading dough in the storefront window watched her gloomily as she passed, his dirty apron whitened with flour over his belly.
The sun had set, and Columbus was dark. She stopped in a drugstore on the corner near her house and bought a Butterfinger and a Baby Ruth. As she was paying, it suddenly seemed very important to her to know the time. She asked the counterman.
“Nearly five,” he said.
“Four forty-five?” she asked.
He looked quizzically at her, then squinted at his watch. “Four fifty-two. And a half,” he added sarcastically.
As she walked quickly back the remaining
half block, she was calculating the minutes it was taking. Her hands were shaking as she turned the key in the lock, as she virtually ran up the wide, worn staircase. In her room, she dumped everything onto the bed and tore open the packaging around the clock. Hurriedly she set it, plugged it in. For a few minutes she sat on her bed watching it, watching the slender hand spin off the seconds, count out these empty moments in her life. She was near tears, but she made herself breathe slowly and evenly, and after a few minutes she felt calmer. She went to the closet and carefully hung up her coat. She began to unpack and arrange her new possessions.
Later she heard the tenants coming in, the doors shutting, the stairs creaking, the toilets flushing. There were footsteps above her. She read Mademoiselle. She read an article on the pill and how it had changed our society. She read another one, on how to get a man to propose. She slept for an hour or so, with her mouth open and dry.
Someone was running a tub. Nina needed to pee. She used her water glass, squatting over it, and then emptied it into the sink. Carefully she washed it out, rinsed it.
Later in the evening she ate the candy bars and went to sleep again, without brushing her teeth.
Nina passed four days this way. She tried to think of herself as exploring, as getting ready—to find a job, a life. The third afternoon she actually walked miles down High Street, to where the campus started, but then she was confused by its size, by the ugly modern buildings, the vast parking lots, the sense of no center. She asked questions in a foreign accent, maybe French, which made everyone expansive and patient. She found an administration building, but the employment office in it was for students. For outside employment, the woman at the desk told her, she’d have to go to the personnel office, in another building. The secretary gave her a map of the campus and pointed it out, but Nina got lost on the way. It was getting dark too, so she found someone to direct her back to High Street, and she went home.
That night when all the noises in the house had stopped and everyone seemed to have gone to bed, she took a bath in the rust-stained tub, scouring it thoroughly both before herself and after.
Nina woke in the night and turned over. Sticky, wet, her thigh made a faint ripping sound as it came off the sheet. She reached quickly between her legs. She brought her hand up to within inches of her face, trying to see in the dark. Then she licked her fingers: Blood! She pressed her hand to her face, smearing the stickiness over herself, making a muted, eager noise.
In the low wattage of the bedside lamp, the blood was blackish on the sheets—it looked as though a violent deed had happened here. Nina’s nightgown was smeared and clotted, and she took it off, wadded it up and jammed it between her legs. She shuffled naked across the room to the sink. She wet the washcloth and rubbed its steamy warmth slowly up and down her inner legs and thighs, and then bent backward and moved it over her streaked buttocks. Then her face where she’d smeared it. She went to her bureau, opened the drawer, and slipped on a loose sweater and a skirt.
She stripped the sheets and the mattress pad off the bed. Blood had soaked through into the mattress, joining the other, fainter stains there. Nina brought the bedding over to the sink. She ran a basin of cold water and began to dunk the bloody spots into it. She rubbed the bar of soap across them and scrubbed and scrubbed. Her hands reddened in the cold, they ached sharply. The water turned pink. A good girl, she worked for a long time, holding the sheet up repeatedly to the inadequate light, turning it, sliding another patch of it under her gaze to check for stains. She talked to herself as she worked, planning her next steps, and twice she laughed out loud.
When she finished, she pushed the old, stiff curtains back and draped the sheets on the bared rods. Then she lay down on the lumpy stained mattress, with the nightgown still between her legs, to wait for the sheets to dry, to wait for day. It seemed to her she could feel the blood ebbing, seeping slowly out of her. Clearly she pictured the long hallways at school, her Latin class, her room at home. She tried not to think of Philip, but when she did, it was as though his power were in the waste blood flowing so slowly out of her body. The very images that had made her nearly cry out in longing for him in that other life—his darkened cock stiffened as flat against his belly as a sword strapped to him, his face shiny from licking her—these seemed suddenly distasteful, even foolish. And she felt a sad and emptied sense of freedom, a reluctant joy at being returned to her solitary self.
When she woke, it was early morning. The sunlight was glowing through the hanging sheets. They were lifting, shifting in the breeze that flowed in through the drafty old windows, as the heavier, real curtains, stiffened with ancient dirt, hadn’t been able to. They were, for a moment, the curtains she’d pictured when she still loved Philip, the curtains that would have blown lightly into the rooms she could have made in that beautiful, trapped life. As she reached to pull them down, to remake the bed, they fell on her face as cool as snow—soap-smelling, still slightly damp. Beyond them through the dirty glass Nina saw the lustrous wash of the early-morning sun strike the buildings across the way, and the world seemed to beckon her, to glow through the film with an infinitely bright, steady promise.
Chapter 16
June 1979
Nina was the first to arrive, and so she had the summer house to herself for several hours before anyone else got there. It had been closed up all year. She went around the rooms, banging open the sticky windows and wiping down the high trailing cobwebs before she started to make the beds. The linen closet still bore little signs on each shelf in her grandmother’s printing—the ink bleached to a pale, dreamy blue now—telling you the size of the sheets stacked in each pile. Nine had no memory of her grandmother, but she thought of her always in connection with what was welcoming, what was orderly and gracious, in this old shingle house. And she herself felt unexpectedly a sweep of generosity as she unfurled the first sheet, as she let the air lift it above the bed—there was something so graceful, so expansive, in its sailing motion.
When she was finished in the bedrooms—the beds all neatly made and towels set out for everyone—she went downstairs. There seemed to be no real coffee, but she found a bottle of instant in the pantry and put some water on to boil. She had to chip away at the hardened dark crystals in the bottom of the jar. When she’d loosened enough and mixed the brew, she took her steaming mug and went outside, onto the porch, to drink it. The air was clear and dry, but the smell of the sea was still heavy in it, and the gulls cried anxiously to each other as they circled. There was a couple walking on the beach far below, and a few sunbathers sprinkled here and there on the sand, but no one was in the dark water. It was too chilly for swimming today. Nina pulled her sweater around her, hunkered down in the chair. She had driven up from New York that afternoon in a borrowed car. Everyone else would arrive sometime later today, except Liddie, who was coming just for the service tomorrow.
It was her father who’d called to tell her that Randall had died—he’d been hit by a car when he broke away from a group walk and ran out into the street. It was no one’s fault, her father had said. Just a terrible, terrible accident. The service would be performed by her mother’s brother Paul in the tiny church in this shore town in Connecticut where her grandfather had always summered. Her parents had chosen to have it here because it was near Randall’s residence and because so many of the children lived in the East now—they wouldn’t have far to come.
Nina had been alone in her apartment, working, when the telephone rang. She almost hadn’t answered it; she often didn’t when she was working. Her father’s voice had startled her, shocked her really—he never called. He was direct and quick with the news, and Nina felt she’d stepped within seconds into a kind of emotional limbo. She was unclear what she ought to feel, whether she could feel anything.
She hadn’t seen Randall in almost a year. Even then she’d gone to visit mostly out of a sense of obligation. There was no sign that he had recognized her, though he’d been comfortable enough going out for a wal
k with her on the residence’s grounds. Perhaps he’d thought she was one of those supportive, cheerful-but-firm staff people—and in fact, Nina had tried to keep her voice, her whole bearing, in that mode during the visit.
Randall had thickened and coarsened as a man. Probably he didn’t exercise quite enough, even though part of the program at the home was work: he and Nina had walked among orderly planting beds of vegetables that the residents labored over daily, tiny unidentifiable tender fronds of green the only growth at that point. His face, which had always seemed startled and dreamy when he was younger, now looked simply dull, tuned out. He had a thick, square beard too, because it was easier for the staff to trim that once every few weeks than to shave him daily. Many of the male residents had beards; Nina felt as though she were wandering around the grounds of some strange religious order. She stayed only an hour or so, and when she left, her throat ached from talking nonstop the whole time.
She’d responded to her father automatically on the telephone, without thinking, but she could hear the sympathy and compassion in her tone, and part of her thought, Good, good. After she’d hung up, she stood for a moment looking around the apartment. Will had moved in about six months earlier, and the sight of his handsome possessions—a tweed sofa, the pretty rug, the antique backgammon game—seemed unwelcome, out of place momentarily among her hand-me-downs. She felt disconnected from her life with him. But then she went back to what she’d been doing before the call and finished up. And she was so absorbed in her work that she’d actually forgotten about Randall’s death for several long periods that afternoon.