A Thin Bright Line

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  “Already had,” Ruthie said.

  “So we moved to Chicago with our savings, hoping to get any kind of jobs. At least here no one knew us.”

  “Well, my parents,” Ruthie said.

  “Yes. That’s one of the reasons we chose Chicago. We knew that if we had to, we could live with them until we got our feet back on the ground. They’ve been kind.”

  “Thank god we didn’t have to do that.”

  “I never dreamed I’d ever work for the government again.”

  “It’s kind of a fluke that we are.” Finally Ruthie giggled.

  Maybe a fluke, Lucybelle thought. And maybe not.

  “They were setting up this lab, and I saw the listings for an office manager and a secretary. Of course when we applied, we didn’t tell them that we knew each other.”

  “I said to Beverly, ‘What do we have to lose? They can’t do anything more to us.’”

  “Which wasn’t exactly true. They could have destroyed Chicago for us. Then where would we have gone?”

  “We both got the jobs.”

  “I figured they somehow hadn’t done background checks.”

  “Now we know,” Ruthie said quietly.

  “You didn’t know, before this?” Lucybelle asked.

  “How could we have?” Beverly tightened up again.

  “I thought you would have seen your files.”

  Beverly stared at Lucybelle with deadpan forbearance. Of course they wouldn’t have snooped, as she had done; they couldn’t afford one misstep.

  “We’ve all been waiting for the other shoe to drop,” Dorothy said.

  “Well, it’s dropped,” Ruthie said.

  “Miss Bledsoe—” Dorothy rested her hand on Lucybelle’s shoulder.

  “Please. Just Lucy.”

  “Lucy,” Dorothy started out again. “You’ve—” She stopped herself and looked first at Ruthie and then at Beverly. Her open face seemed to turn inside out with wonderment. “You’ve freed them. Us! If they know . . . if they already know, then . . .”

  “They know,” Lucybelle said. “They definitely know.”

  Dorothy grinned. “And you two thought you were so clever.”

  “We will not be changing a single habit of our lives,” Beverly said firmly.

  “Since we were hired at the same time, it made sense that we’d get an apartment together,” Ruthie said. “So that looked natural.”

  “Still, at any time,” Beverly said.

  “We’re saving money. In case it happens again.”

  “They won’t even take a vacation,” Dorothy said to Lucybelle. “It’s not like I can ever go anywhere. My mother is a full-time job. After paying Sally, the girl from across the street who watches her, I’m saving nothing. Zilch.”

  “Which is why you should be more careful. You of all people can’t afford to lose your job.”

  “One doesn’t let down her guard,” Ruthie said. “One doesn’t advertise anything.”

  “You’re right. You’re always right.” Dorothy winked at Lucybelle.

  “I’m serious,” Beverly said. “Just because Miss Bledsoe here, or Lucy, or whoever, has provided some information that might indicate a bit more safety than we previously thought we had, the situation can deteriorate at any moment. Are you forgetting Martha?”

  Dorothy turned to Lucybelle. “A friend who’s still in Washington is going through this right now. We’ve been pretty upset about Martha.”

  “You don’t even know her,” Beverly said to Dorothy.

  “But I know it’s reminding you of the ordeal all over again.”

  “True,” Ruthie said.

  “She hired a lawyer, which means the whole thing is dragging out for months, and also that the investigation is spreading far and wide.”

  Lucybelle understood: Martha’s decision to fight could bring probing eyes back around to the lives of her friends. No wonder they’d been so touchy these past months.

  “There’s always San Francisco!” Dorothy said. “If you had to move again.”

  “God forbid,” Beverly said.

  “I’m making another round,” Dorothy said. “Everyone?”

  Beverly scooted her chair up to the coffee table and picked up an egg roll. “These are cold.” She dipped it in the sticky red sauce anyway and took a bite. “Help yourself,” she said around the mouthful of fried crust and shredded cabbage.

  “But wait.” Ruthie spoke so quietly it was almost a whisper. “Who did send Lucy that book?”

  Friday, August 23, 1957

  “No more setups,” Lucybelle told her new friends. “I’ve chosen a life of the mind.” She meant the latter comment to sound ironically comical but no one laughed.

  “Well, la-dee-da,” Beverly said.

  Throughout their efforts to find her what Beverly called “an appropriate match,” as if romance were just like hiring employees, Lucybelle hadn’t told them that Bader had warned her against “acting on it.” She knew that the question was moot; there would be no one upon whom she wished to act, at least from their pool of applicants. But she’d wanted to please her friends and maybe make some new ones.

  “You’re stubborn,” Dorothy said.

  “It’s true.”

  “You’re going to have to settle for something a bit more ordinary than a movie star,” Ruthie said.

  “Phyllis was a stage actress.”

  “Well, excuse me.”

  “You said glamorous, though,” Dorothy said. “You said gorgeous.”

  “I thought so.”

  “La-dee-da.”

  “You can’t expect to feel that way at the start,” Ruthie said.

  “I’m not willing to ‘settle’ for anything at all.”

  Dorothy’s eyes gleamed, as if Lucybelle had said something daring. Maybe she had. She would hold out for what? Love? Beverly and Ruthie tightened their lips and straightened their spines, looking both defensive and disdainful. Lucybelle hadn’t meant to suggest that they’d settled, but to say so would only dig herself in deeper. Still, she’d had enough of their matchmaking and had to make that clear.

  “I’m serious,” she said. “No more women. If you arrange something behind my back again, I’ll walk out.”

  “That would be rude,” Ruthie said.

  “Yes, it would be. So let’s avoid the situation altogether. Agreed?”

  “If an opportunity comes along,” Beverly said. “I’d hate to pass it up.”

  “You wouldn’t be passing it up. You have Ruthie.”

  “You’re so difficult.”

  “Thanks. From you, Bev, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  Beverly smiled.

  “Why aren’t you setting up Dorothy, anyway?”

  “She has her mother.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Think about it,” Dorothy said. “I have to be home every night, except occasionally when I can get Sally to stay. Relationships are hard enough. Who wants to take on someone’s mother on top of all the rest?”

  “It’s not like your mother would know. She has dementia.”

  The picture this created, of Dorothy and a girlfriend carrying on under the same roof as her uncomprehending mother, triggered a laughing fit.

  “It’s not funny!” Ruthie cried out, but the more they tried to stop, the harder they laughed.

  “Oh, no!” Beverly rocked in uncharacteristic merriment. “This is wrong! Stop! Stop!”

  They spewed mouthfuls of gin and cracker crumbs. No one laughed harder than Dorothy who had tears streaming down her face.

  “In any case,” Lucybelle said when they finally calmed, “I’m not looking for a relationship. Please respect that.”

  Each of the dates they’d set up for her had been disastrous. One woman flinched every time Lucybelle spoke, as if her words were knife jabs. Another, with whom she spent an afternoon at the Art Institute, stood before each painting scowling before offering criticism, always negative. When Lucybelle showed her The
Song of the Lark, she said, “Ugh. Farmland. What’s more boring than that?” In July, a friend of Beverly’s, a literature professor from Vassar, visited for the weekend. That woman spoke primarily in lines of memorized poetry, impressive, but off-putting by the end of the weekend. When Lucybelle asked if she’d read HOWL, Geneviève recoiled as if Lucybelle had offered her a hallucinatory drug.

  “No ‘angelheaded hipsters staggering on tenement roofs illuminated’ for you, huh?” Lucybelle asked, and the look on Geneviève’s face dismissed her for good.

  Lucybelle liked a little better the one who owned a red Mustang and drove too fast along Lake Shore Drive, but it turned out she could only drive, not talk. After a great deal of racing about in the Mustang, they finally stopped for dinner at a mediocre pub, and Babs shoved french fries around on her plate and made monosyllabic remarks. Lucybelle tried her best to ignite a conversation, but then gave up halfway through the meal and they ate in silence until the check arrived.

  The last one, a woman named Leslie, she liked well enough to accept three dates, though she was aware that her loneliness was getting the best of her, because while Leslie was nice-looking and well spoken, Lucybelle had more fun with L’Forte. On the third date, while having drinks at the Drake Hotel, Leslie cocked her head shyly and asked whose apartment would be best.

  “Best for what?”

  “Us.”

  “Us?”

  “I only have a studio. You mentioned that you have an extra room, so . . .”

  “No. I’m sorry. No.”

  Leslie left the Drake Hotel in anger, as if by accepting three dates Lucybelle had agreed to an entire relationship.

  But the months of dating had been useful. She needn’t feel bad about adhering to Bader’s rule because there were no temptations. The dates also proved that she wasn’t afraid. No threat would stop her from doing as she pleased. The fact of the matter was, she’d agreed to be a widow for her own sake, not for Bader’s. The clarity of the agreement appealed to her. No women. No messes. No heartbreak. She and L’Forte were doing just fine on their own.

  On Friday nights Lucybelle often had to choose between having drinks with Beverly, Ruthie, and Dorothy in Evanston or taking the train into town with the fellows. She felt guilty for sometimes preferring the company of the scientists. They hewed to facts, searched with unbound curiosity for truths about whatever interested them, even when it was only ice. They were freewheeling, raucous, hell-bent on finding answers to questions, while the women did the opposite, used nearly all their energy to cover up the truth about their lives. But how unfair her judgments were when the scientists and their wives enjoyed the full support of society. No one called them perverted, twisted, inverted. No one threatened their jobs.

  Everyday Lucybelle looked for a hairline fracture, a place in the social fabric of not just SIPRE, but Chicago, the whole country, where truth might collect like rain, freeze, and force open the gap. This was the story she wanted to tell, the novel she wanted to write, but first she had to find the chink.

  Late that summer she bought a table and chair for her typewriter, and she began writing pages of story under the words “Chapter One.” They weren’t any good. What did she have to write about? Crows, rice fields, her love for a desperate actress. Cather had made stories from the prairie, from actresses and trains, dirt and sky. And light, mostly just light. She’d managed to sneak in subversions too, and yet they were snuck, tucked, hiding. Cather didn’t go far enough, nowhere near far enough. Most nights Lucybelle tore up her pages.

  September 1957

  The week Little Rock tried to integrate Central High School, Lucybelle bought a television set for her apartment. Everything, it seemed, drew her back to Arkansas.

  The one girl hadn’t gotten the message that she was supposed to meet the others so they could climb those stairs and walk in the front door together. She endured the jeers and projectiles of fruit all by herself. When the mob prevented her from getting near the high school entrance, she turned around and walked to the bus stop, where she sat and waited, alone. She wore a white blouse and a full skirt she’d made herself. A pair of sunglasses, her only shield, didn’t hide the expression on her face. The girl’s mouth was a bruise, her chin a balustrade holding up the entire country, her thin bare arms, hugging books to her chest, utterly vulnerable. She walked away from the tormentors, away from the Arkansas National Guard’s guns, with her head held steady, a slim insistence in her stride.

  Lucybelle knew how that Arkansas sun, its muddy light, felt on bare skin. How the eyes of those insensate boys and girls could scrape and tear.

  The summer she was nine years old, a witless neighbor boy snuck into the yard and peeked into her sunshine pen. She heard him approach, even saw his eyeball in the crack between two boards, but she refused to gather her clothes to her body or call for help. Penned and naked, she lay on her back, her arms at her sides, her legs slightly spread, and looked back at his greasy pupil. A couple of years older than her, he was a scrawny boy, high-voiced and always looking for small acts of revenge. He’d found a situation in which he could dominate.

  Already though she’d learned to toss her imagination far beyond the pen. She flew with the crows, way above the town, effortlessly riding sweet lilting drafts, not even bothering to look down on the little square houses and parched fields and stupid boys. The second time he came, she lifted a finger and pointed directly at his eyeball in the crack between the boards. He gasped, as if she’d put a hex on him, and she heard the thump of his bare feet running across the weedy grass.

  Lucybelle’s heart hurt with admiration for the young people attempting to attend Little Rock’s Central High. Eventually the president ordered the Arkansas National Guard to protect, rather than target, the children. How strange to see the same men who’d threatened the students with their aimed guns now escorting them. Helicopters circled the sky over the school and tanks rolled down the surrounding streets. A few white kids stood inside the high school entrance and extended their hands, welcomed the new students. How slight a gesture, though, a handshake, next to the wet food hurtling toward their faces, along with the spit, the shoves, the ugly words. Worst of all, the ugly words.

  This was America. This was Arkansas.

  Thursday, October 31, 1957

  Lucybelle decided to go to the Halloween party as Djuna Barnes. At least Dorothy would appreciate the costume. She spent an entire Saturday haunting secondhand stores, shopping for her ensemble. She found a perfect black cape, a white scarf with black polka dots, and even a silver-headed ebony walking stick. The hat would be key, and she ended up buying that new. The black snap-brim fedora with a gray hatband was Djuna Barnes to a tee.

  Now she just hoped her friends didn’t chicken out. Dorothy had received the invitation and suggested they all go. Beverly, of course, said that the timing was poor, maybe another time. Ruthie threw caution to the wind and said they needed to have some fun. “Okay,” Beverly said, caving in as she always did to Ruthie’s wishes.

  “Besides,” Dorothy pointed out. “We’ll be in disguise.”

  “Remember,” Lucybelle said. “They already know. And they haven’t fired you.”

  Beverly huffed.

  The day of the party Lucybelle starched and ironed a white shirt so that the collar stood up stiffly. She pulled on her own black trousers and wrapped the polka dot scarf around her neck. She fastened the black cape at her throat. As the final touch, she applied lipstick so deeply red it was nearly black. She positioned the fedora on her head, slightly to the right and tipped forward over her right eyebrow. Her thick-lensed, cat-eye glasses looked ridiculous, and so, at the last second, she tossed them on top of the stack of books on her bedside table.

  When Dorothy came to pick her up, she squealed with delight at the costume. Beverly and Ruthie, peering through the windshield of their Pontiac, were less enthusiastic. Lucybelle swished the black cape at their skeptical faces and then twirled with her walking stick aloft.
/>   “Dracula?” Beverly asked as Lucybelle got into the backseat.

  “She’s Djuna Barnes!” Dorothy adjusted her oversized pirate hat. She wore a patch over one eye, a billowy red blouse, and a real sword in a sheath at her waist, which had made getting in the car rather difficult.

  Beverly wore a clown suit, complete with a strap-on red-ball nose and a bright pink wig of curly hair. Ruthie was dressed as herself, in a simple green sweater and black skirt, driving the car like a chaperone.

  “I couldn’t think of anything,” she said. “I was going to be a geologist, but Bev nixed that.”

  “I could just see us getting pulled over, and there would be Ruthie with her blue jeans and flannel shirt, pickaxe in hand. You count the number of things we could be arrested for.”

  “Why would we get pulled over?” Lucybelle asked.

  The women in the car were silent, and for the millionth time she remembered that Beverly lived her life expecting to be pulled over, one way or another.

  “For being a pickaxe murderer?” Dorothy finally suggested, and they all laughed.

  Dorothy reached across the backseat and squeezed Lucybelle’s hand. “You look great. But can you see?”

  “No. Stay close, okay? Make sure I don’t walk into walls.”

  “You won’t be at a disadvantage without your glasses,” Ruthie said, maneuvering the car into a parking space several blocks away from the party, in case anyone collected license plate numbers. “Everyone will be in costume. No one will know who they’re talking to.”

  “You’re not in costume.”

  Lucybelle wished Dorothy hadn’t stated the obvious. Did Ruthie intend to wait in the car? Maybe she saw herself as their getaway driver. But she surprised Lucybelle by nodding sharply, bravely, and stepping briskly out of the Pontiac.

  Lucybelle was excited about the party, and she took the lead walking to the front door. She rang the bell and as they waited, Beverly nervously adjusted her pink wig and Ruthie checked their surroundings.

  A large woman with very short hair, blue jeans, a plaid flannel shirt, and a man’s jacket opened the door. Dorothy had to grab Beverly’s hand to keep her from retreating.