A Thin Bright Line

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  “I didn’t even tell her what city.”

  “I don’t know, honey. It wasn’t me.”

  “I miss you too,” she said. “Why don’t you come visit. You and Wesley would love Chicago.”

  “What fun! Tell me about the new friends you’ve made.”

  He was a psychiatrist, he was supposed to see and understand individuals, but his cheeriness, his need for everyone to be happy, only exacerbated her loneliness. She’d grown up in a place where everyone knew everyone else. They liked you or they didn’t, but there was no work to do about it. You didn’t “make” friends. You just existed. You were just you. Most people did like Lucybelle when they got to know her, but she’d never learned how to lure a friend. Since leaving home, she’d depended on the charisma of others, like Krutch or Phyllis. She’d never felt so alone as she did now.

  “How are you? How’s Wesley?”

  “I’m well. A fascinating roster of patients at the moment. They keep me on my toes. And Wesley has discovered some obscure composer about whom he’s terribly keen.” She let herself sink into the husky warmth of Harry’s voice. “How’s L’Forte? I understand you abducted him.”

  “He’s fine. We walk to the lake, if you can call that massive body of water a lake. There are actual waves. I can’t yet get him to go in after a stick, but maybe in warmer weather.”

  “Smart fellow. If you wanted a swimmer, you should have gotten a spaniel, not a dachshund.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Are the people friendly?”

  She considered the question. Bader’s social style had a voracious quality that took it several degrees beyond the word friendly, and this was perfectly balanced by Ruthie and Beverly’s chilliness. “If you added them up and took an average,” she said, “I would say yes, they’re friendly enough.”

  “Good! Wonderful!”

  Lucybelle pitied Harry’s patients. Perhaps his obliviousness was useful, something they could do battle against.

  “I’m bushed,” she told him. “I’ve been working ridiculously long hours.”

  “Don’t do that to yourself. You need to play. We all need play.”

  Lucybelle lit a cigarette. “I’ll find a sandbox. I better go. It’s nice to hear your voice.” No point in reminding him to refrain from sharing information about her with Phyllis. She hadn’t divulged anything new and what he did know he’d apparently already dispatched.

  “Call again soon. Take care of yourself.”

  Lucybelle let L’Forte under the covers that night. Only women, according to her agreement with Bader, were disallowed. The dachshund settled in with a long shuddering sigh, as if he’d missed as much sleep as she had. In the few moments before the soporific effect of her warm bed sucked away her consciousness, Lucybelle took inventory of her life: thirty-three years old, single, tucked into the middle of the country, a dog and a woman, a difficult job, part of a team trying to understand the ice caps. Was that enough?

  Monday, December 31, 1956

  In September the idea of that enormous lake just a few blocks away had entranced her—she’d moved to the seaside!—but now it felt more like an ominous and stormy presence splashing at her door. After a nightmare in which a tidal wave washed her off the apartment steps as she was leaving for work, L’Forte too grew afraid of the lake. It was as if he’d dreamed along with her; in the morning after her drowning dream, he refused to go outside at all. She had to carry him to his tree. Later in the week, when she coaxed him out on walks, he balked at the end of his leash when the water came into view, forcing her to take him on strolls through downtown Evanston instead. She supposed the crisp shops and populated sidewalks comforted him, though nothing about Evanston resembled the Village where the narrow streets embraced a person and the buttery aroma of warm pastries and the clinking of coffee cups on saucers softened the effects of winter.

  Here in the Midwest, the winter air smelled metallic and knifed at Lucybelle’s skin. She had a pair of prescription dark glasses made, but they did little to mitigate the icy brightness. She imagined that even Bader was more comfortable than she was, wintering-over in Greenland, hunkered down in some igloo, planning his city under the ice by candlelight.

  Her brother in Oregon had invited her out there for Christmas, but Helen was very pregnant, and with their three other children, Lucybelle guessed they didn’t need a houseguest. Instead she’d gone home to Pocahontas for a few days, returning to Illinois well before New Year’s.

  She resumed her regular work schedule even though most of the staff had taken that week off. Russell Woo came into the lab for an hour or so every day, and a couple of the other scientists stopped in to find things on their desks or get a bit of time away from their families, but for the most part she was able to work with gratifying concentration. By the end of the month, she’d reached the bottom of her piles.

  Still, she went to work and sat in her office, sharpened pencils, and read scientific papers that had been published before her tenure at SIPRE. The lab library contained a wealth of geological information and by the start of 1957, she’d be better versed in the literature than some of the scientists. So far as she knew, Bader never did speak to any of them about her job title and attendant skills and duties. She’d have to earn their respect the hard way, with impeccable integrity, unflinching endurance of every joke and test, and by making them dependent upon her intelligence.

  On New Year’s Eve, at around eight in the evening, she slipped a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter and typed, “Chapter One.” She tried to think of the opening lines of her favorite novels but could only hear Ginsberg’s lilting threat. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn . . . She wanted to eat those lines and spit them out at the same time. She had to find her own true, potent words. She reached into that place just in front of her coccyx, perhaps it was at the base of her uterus, where she felt the truest story she knew. She must transport the words of that story from there, concentrated in her viscera, up to her brain, where they could be organized into sentences and sent back down through her neck, across her shoulders, along her arms, and pop out of her fingertips onto the typewriter keys.

  As she sat trying to do this, she experienced a calm expansion, as if a hundred doors opened up inside her. It was a lovely feeling, that sense of possibility, until too many minutes had passed without the feeling producing a single good paragraph. She ripped the sheet of paper from the typewriter, the roller gears stuttering, and tossed it in the wastepaper basket. She fed in another sheet of paper and again typed, “Chapter One.”

  It was after nine o’clock when she rose from her desk. Even Russell Woo wouldn’t come into the lab this late, and certainly not on New Year’s Eve. Everyone would be at parties by now. Peter Hauser’s wife, Emily, had invited her to one they were having and she should have gone. She had planned on going. She could still go. She could take the train home, put on her burgundy dress and black heels, and call a taxicab. She’d be there well before the celebratory moment.

  Instead she found herself trying the door to Bader’s office. It was unlocked of course. That man probably had never locked a door in his life. Two filing cabinets towered in the corner behind his desk, a total of eight drawers. Perhaps, she told herself, she could organize these for him.

  Even without an audience, standing there in the lab offices completely alone, she embarrassed herself with the false pretense. She had no intention of becoming a filing clerk, as she’d made very clear, nor was she willing to lie to herself. What she wanted was to see what kind of information about her he’d accumulated and squirreled away.

  Actually, what she really wanted was to find out what Ruthie and Beverly might have discovered about her.

  A few weeks before Christmas, on a day too snowy for leaving the building, Lucybelle had tried to join them in the lunchroom. Usually Ruthie and Beverly took their lunches off premises, sometimes with
Dorothy Shipwright the SIPRE librarian. When they did eat in the lunchroom, they came in late, after Lucybelle was already seated, and took places at the other table, as far from her as they could get. This time Lucybelle re-wrapped her bologna and mustard sandwich in its waxed paper and moved to their table.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  Beverly’s face pruned up and she looked away. Ruthie giggled nervously and then coughed into her hands, hiding her entire face with the gesture. Dorothy smiled at her with what Lucybelle thought might be relief and gestured toward an empty chair. “Please.”

  “We’d better get back to work,” Beverly said wadding up her own waxed paper.

  “You’ve only eaten half your sandwich,” Lucybelle pointed out.

  The office manager and secretary stood up and pushed in their chairs. Dorothy hesitated as Beverly and Ruthie left the lunchroom. She leaned across the table and said, “I’m sorry,” but then she too walked away.

  On the Friday night before the start of everyone’s holiday, Lucybelle was in her own office, with the door open, when she heard the three women making plans in the foyer.

  Dorothy said, “Eight o’clock? Your place?”

  “Oh good. You got Sally to stay with your mother.”

  “Yes, thank god. I need a break.”

  “Bring those eggrolls,” Ruthie said and then snickered. “With the dipping sauce.”

  “Don’t I always?”

  Lucybelle stepped into the foyer. “What are you all doing tonight?” she asked. It was humiliating, hinting at an invitation.

  “I’m going to clean house,” Beverly said.

  “I guess I’ll visit my folks,” Ruthie said.

  “Look, I overheard you making plans just now.”

  Everyone froze in a diorama of office life: Beverly’s hand on the doorknob, Ruthie’s coat pulled on just one shoulder, Dorothy gripping the handset of the telephone. The dial tone buzz rasped against the silence.

  “I’m sorry,” Dorothy finally said. “It’s a difficult time.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Good night, Miss Bledsoe.” Beverly pulled open the door. As many times as Lucybelle had asked her to use her first name, Beverly made a point of being especially formal in her presence.

  “Your sergeant is leaving,” Lucybelle said to the other two who gaped at her angry outburst.

  “Actually,” Beverly turned swiftly to face Lucybelle again. “I am a sergeant. I served my country in the war. What about you?”

  “No rank,” Lucybelle said. “Just a civilian editor trying to make friends.”

  Dorothy reached out a hand and squeezed Lucybelle’s forearm before following the other two out the door.

  She was pretty sure Bader wouldn’t have gossiped about her romantic proclivities, but as the office manager Beverly might have access to personnel files. All three of the other female SIPRE employees were unmarried, so perhaps they feared what any kind of association with her might suggest about themselves. Or perhaps it was she herself they feared: the predatory habits of gay girls were well known. That was almost funny. Me, Lucybelle thought, with my thick cat-eye glasses and too deeply set eyes, my twig-snapping limbs, on the hunt.

  Well, she’d find out what her security clearance papers said and maybe that would explain the ladies’ behavior. If it did, she’d find a way to move forward with them, beyond whatever crude notions they nursed. The current chill was unacceptable.

  She located her slim file and pulled out the manila folder. Her application papers were there, and a glowing letter from Link Washburn, the one recommending her to Bader in the first place. An official looking but nearly indecipherable document from the State Department, stamped with an affirmation of her security clearance, lurked behind the letter. She found nothing damning whatsoever, no mention of Phyllis Dove, nor any murky photographs of her with a blond girl in a dark entryway. The skinniness of her file disappointed her, a reaction she recognized as laughable. She should be relieved, but instead she felt erased, or at best, inconsequential. She read through the application papers until she came to the part where Bader had insisted she write, “Widowed.” In the four months she’d been at SIPRE, no one had asked her about the husband killed in the war, no one had asked her any personal questions at all, so she hadn’t had to lie, not yet. She slipped the flimsy file into its place among the B’s and flipped back to the T’s. There she withdrew Beverly Turnbull’s file, which, perhaps the office manager would be pleased to note, was much thicker than Lucybelle’s.

  A good hour passed as she read with great interest the details of Beverly’s employment history. The woman had indeed served her country in the war and had received an honorable discharge, only to be fired from a secretarial position in the State Department in 1952. A document outlining the details of her dismissal made the cause quite clear without using any overt language. A quick check of Ruthie Underwood’s file revealed that she and Beverly lived together in Evanston. Lucybelle and the two women were practically neighbors, though she’d not once seen them in the grocery store, drugstore, or anywhere at all in public. Each morning they arrived at work in separate cars.

  Lucybelle pushed the file cabinet drawer slowly and silently back into its housing, as if she might set off another round of dismissals if she made even the tiniest sound, and crept out of Bader’s office. She sat again at her own desk and stared at the words “Chapter One” typed on the sheet of paper in her typewriter. That well of calm she’d felt earlier in the evening, the possibility of a story, was gone. Instead a thick, muzzy curtain closed on her imagination. How tired she’d grown of Phyllis’s weakness, the constant maneuverings to conceal. Now here were Beverly and Ruthie, sneaking about, afraid of their own lives.

  A charge of contempt bolted through her, followed quickly by a sinking feeling of shame. How hypocritical of her to judge. She’d agreed to “widowed.” Worse, she’d agreed to be permanently single. Beverly had lost her job, been exposed to the entire world, and still she lived with Ruthie. Their personalities may have warped under the pressure, and yet they were undoubtedly having cocktails, maybe even eggrolls with dipping sauce, together tonight.

  While she, Lucybelle Bledsoe, thirty-three years old, was still typing the words “Chapter One” followed by blank pages.

  She rose from her desk, and as if she were the night watchman, climbed the stairs to the cold labs on the top floor. She stepped into one of the refrigerated rooms and let the chill suck away her body heat. Lined with insulating aluminum-coated cork, these labs were cooled by chemicals circulated from huge tanks on the roof. It was Bader’s dream to not only drill ice cores in both Greenland and Antarctica, but to keep them intact and frozen, which he did by having them packed in six-foot aluminum rods and shipped by refrigerated airplanes and trucks all the way to here, Wilmette, Illinois. Already they were studying the structure of ice crystals, and even some partial cores, but an entire core of ice, that would be like reading the rings in trees, only the record would reveal not just hundreds of years, but thousands of years. The dust, mold, bacteria, and ancient air trapped in these ice cores would tell a story of epic proportion about our planet.

  Lucybelle wondered what Bader saw when he stepped out of his igloo in Greenland. There would be no sunlight up there in the Arctic for weeks to come, and yet the moon on all that ice would be luminous. She imagined a soft and transcendent blue reflected on his pale skin, the big roughness of the man diminished to a speck in the vista-busting space surrounding him. It must feel so good to see far enough at last, to experience such vast illumination. Sometimes she almost thought she loved him, but it wasn’t love and it wasn’t him. She ached for the companionship of someone who had such grand vision.

  She supposed she ought to feel some kind of satisfaction in her discoveries about the office staff, but what she’d learned about them only made her feel more rather than less lonely. The endless subterfuge—driving to work separately when the powers that be knew, or at least could know
by a careful reading of their files, that they lived together!—was like being buried alive. She looked at the thick door of the refrigeration room. Another few minutes and hypothermia would take her quite painlessly. She’d slip to the floor and fall unconscious. The moment reminded her of the one on the bridge, when she considered what it would be like to jump.

  That woman had come along, the one with the camera. Stella. She really ought to return the Ginsberg poems. With radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas. Had he written that line about her? It was absurdly egotistical to think so. They’d met only briefly before he left Columbia for his travels, and yet she was the only student in the graduate program from that state. They’d talked just that once, at a party, but he’d laughed at Arkansas and said her eyes were like little caves with candles burning deep within.

  Yes, she ought to return Stella’s book. She’d brought it in to work weeks ago, intending to make the call, get an address, and send it out with the office mail, but found she couldn’t quite part with the poems. For goodness’ sake, she could buy herself a copy. She needn’t steal Stella’s. And stealing is what it would be if she didn’t call the girl and get the book back to her. The Willa Cather picture was one aberrant incident, with extenuating circumstances—she was a Cather devotee—but if she did it again it would be a pattern. A pattern of thievery. This made Lucybelle smile. In fact, the entire train of thought reversed her mood. She left the cold lab and ran down the flight of stairs.

  In her office she put on her plum wool coat and sat at her desk shivering. It was New Year’s Eve. Stella would be out like everyone else. This could be a practice call. Lucybelle lifted the handset and dialed.

  “Acme Transport. Happy New Year. May I help you?” The voice on the other end of the line was melodious, southern, a lazy float on warm water.

  Stella had given her a false number, written any old string of digits inside the book cover, just to play with Lucybelle, a tease, like the exaggerated swagger. She began to hang up but stopped midair. The woman’s voice sounded like home and she wanted to hear her say something else, so Lucybelle said, “Yes, thank you. This is a taxicab service?”