The Wintering

by Joan Williams

She wished, a little, someone would notice her. With nothing else to do, she listened to the conversation at the table and was sorry to hear that Tony’s prospective show was to be held in the YMCA and that the director was a friend of Anila’s. Was the show being held as a favor for her, and not because Tony’s work merited one? Having persistently drunk her beer, and now wanting another, Amy did not want to cross the room to the bar. She feared being watched anywhere, uncertain what should not be observed. She admired girls here, with courage to be as they wanted, though it was not a life she could understand. Her own situation, however, was not understandable to many, even to Jeff. Had she cut herself off too thoroughly from everything she had ever known? Any thought of pain, at night, set her eyes open in panic. Ambulances in New York, she had been told, did not respond to a random caller’s voice, and suppose she lay alone, some night, and died?

  There was sadness here, too, and even Anila’s brusqueness might be a cover-up. Some of these girls Amy had met other places and knew several had been married. Many had a wan quality; akin to hers, she supposed. Here in the dim light in the off-on rosiness of a blinking neon beer sign, faces had an uncertain look. With suddenness, Amy crossed the room and bought three beers. This basement room had seemed a retreat. Amy determined to keep struggling to find out what ordinary and everyday living meant.

  “Why,” Anila said after thanking Amy for the beer, “don’t you cut your hair?”

  To Amy’s disgust, no answer would come. She had opened her mouth ineffectually and without sound. She was grateful to Tony for rescuing her. “She doesn’t have to,” he said, which she longed to have said for herself. “Anyway, she’s straight.”

  Anila agreeably turned back to her business with Tony, leaving Amy to her own devices, sipping beer. Eventually, when Anila stood up, jarring the table, she looked from one to another. Then her attention focused on Amy. “Now,” she said, “I’m coming very early to see his paintings. Is he ever up by nine?”

  Amy had not time to collect her thoughts. A voice seemed to answer for her, which she found to be her own. “Why, I have no idea,” she said.

  With an impatient look, Anila turned to go, her final words lingering like stabs in Amy’s heart. How sweet, how innocent, she had muttered. Amy, watching her walk away, realized she had wanted the girl to like her; and what had she put out to gain friendship but a little money for a beer. She went up the stairs hastily, toward the safer openness of the street, and waited for Tony, who had stopped to talk. Nearby, the doors of a Spanish café stood open, throwing out high-pitched conversations, rapid as castanets. Music inside was lavish and quick-tempered. Amy thought of some badly tinted old travelog, where beautiful, long-waisted Spanish women danced in ruffled dresses, their arms above their heads, bougainvillea tucked behind one ear. Her visions spread outward to any foreign country. And perhaps that was her answer, that she had not travelled far enough.

  In the café’s doorway stood a man, dark and foreign and treacherous-looking. And was she alone? he seemed to be asking, until Tony emerged, elflike in the dim light. Never before had she noticed how squashed to his head Tony’s ears were, or how pointed. But she turned toward him in a sort of desperation. In the doorway, the man seemed to be giving her one more chance. He stared on at her, invitingly. His glance toward Tony had been insignificant, the way grownups acknowledge freedom to gossip before an uncomprehending child. As Amy clutched Tony’s arm, a gutteral laugh escaped the man. If only she knew what she was missing! He gave another uncomprehending and flickering glance toward Tony. He then looked at her with pity. She had rushed Tony into the street, where they stood combating traffic, having stupidly gone against the light.

  Turning over in midmorning sunlight, Amy avoided the sight of Tony sleeping with his mouth open. Two green flies buzzed in a bothered way against the screen. Getting up, she thrust further open a torn place and freed them to the city. Cautious eyes on Tony, she dressed, not wanting to be seen. She particularly could not imagine being revealed naked in this strong morning sunlight. One of his hands lay limply on his stomach, with a look as useless as a single glove. At the window, clad in her slip, Amy imagined herself as the cover of a cheap true-confessions magazine. Midday in her rumpled underclothes, her hair mussed, she felt slatternly.

  Today, even Tony’s gigantic colorful canvases added nothing to the plainness of his other room. Dressed and coming into it, she felt disgust at ants, Indian-file along the table going toward dabs of peanut butter and jelly. No longer did it seem to add up to experience to live in squalor. It was not even worth relating to anyone that the plates off which they ate always had to be washed in the bathtub at the end of the hall. Tony’s sink was too small to hold them, though it held cups. When Amy moved a stack of dirty ones, circumspect brown bugs darted for the open drain. Tony last night had asked for an appraisal of his pictures. Thrusting out her chin, Amy had said that some looked merely like slashes of paint, or paint thrown, on canvas.

  In a fit, Tony had said she was still a hick from wherever she had come from. She liked probably only paintings that looked like photographs and had not a single idea in her head. Had she read Freud or Marx or anything besides Jeffrey Almoner! What a fool, always defending this country. She ought to go back where she belonged. He then expounded lengthily on the meanings of his paintings and so windily that Amy reassured him, hastily, that she knew nothing about painting. But now that he told how he thought them out, she understood much better. But this morning, she came into the room and thought the pictures seemed merely slashes and dashes of paint on canvas.

  Evidence of mice was everywhere in the room. In the night, she had sat bolt upright, thinking something had run across her feet. Nothing had confronted her but the darkness, that boldly. Wondering what had made her wake, she had decided it was simply apprehensiveness, constantly with her.

  Moonlight had seemed not to penetrate the apartment. She had been glad for daylight when it came, at last. Tony’s lax hand, his total surrender to sleep, had given Amy an opposite feeling, that she must do something energetic. After washing cups and straightening the apartment, she gathered a laundry pile by picking up clothes off the floor.

  To be outside with something to do made the streets themselves seemed more functional. She was passing quickly a building with a doorman, usually suspicious and rough. Today, he called in a friendly way, “A big load for a little lady!” Courteously, he drew a baby carriage out of her way.

  In the laundromat, ladies with flabby thighs, in curlers, turned their heads at the same instant toward her. They mistook her for a bride, as Amy blushed profusely, having dropped some of Tony’s underwear. Several women swarmed toward her, like a welcoming committee. She was ceremoniously provided with correct change and informed how to operate the machines. And bring her own soap the next time, she was cautioned. To buy it in miniature boxes from a machine was too expensive. The clothes sloshing in suds gave Amy a comfortable feeling. Lounging in a chair, with a coverless old magazine, she watched the washing cycle hypnotically. To transfer clothes to the dryer was also a satisfactory feeling. They came out with buttons and zippers too hot to touch, warm and smelling good. She then copied heavy-armed housewives, busily smoothing their clothes until they seemed ironed. Carrying her completed stack like an offering, on extended arms, she went back happily into the street.

  Tony, having just waked, blinked owlishly. He accepted his cleaner apartment and his clean clothes as his due. That was what girls did, wasn’t it?

  “Not usually, unless they’re your wife or your mother—or something,” Amy said, at a loss as to what she meant to Tony.

  Seizing the opportunity, he said bitingly, “You’ll make a good little suburban housewife. That’s how you’ll end up, with a husband on Wall Street.” He kept on feeling irked, as usual, that she always had money.

  You want to bet? Amy’s angry look said. Lavish with green cleanser, she bit her lip, scrubbing his filthy sink. On hands and knees, she had spread poisonous pellets
for mice, while he watched with folded arms, his pale face soft and runny-looking, like the margarine left out and gone rancid.

  With arms wet to her elbows, Amy rung out the sponge capably. She wanted to rush to her room and accomplish cleaning it. Sitting back on her haunches after spreading pellets, she had come up with an enviable idea about giving life impetus: get one thing done in order to get on to something else. She went huffily and hurriedly from Tony’s apartment.

  Mornings afterward, when she woke in her own, she would circumspectly watch the women in the loft opposite; always, the wheel on the tailor’s machine would already be spinning. She had for these people more compassion. With something akin to joy, she would hurry through dressing to go out for breakfast. She would come from that still with her sense of eagerness, but suddenly all her energy would lag. Back in her room, she lay on her bed to summon up strength, for something.

  She heard no more from Tony, and lonesomeness took her finally to him. He yanked open the door angrily and said he was painting. Anila had said he did not have enough finished work for her to take to the YMCA director.

  “Are you painting alone?” Amy asked.

  Apparently with a memory lapse, which Amy envied, he yelled, “Of course!” and slammed the door.

  She went back to her room to straighten drawers. She threw away letters from friends, then from family, but took those back shortly from the wastebasket. She kept all the letters she had ever received from Jeff in a blue satin stocking box. Rereading them, she would think they were all posterity was ever to know of Amy Howard.

  Her father wrote only exclamatory postscripts at the end of Edith’s letters, which made Amy feel he was too busy to write. Though was it possible he could not find common ground with her, or that he was shy. Could her father be shy? If she went to the Waldorf, Edith wrote, look up an assistant manager with whom her father had gone to school back in Arkansas. Have you seen any Broadway shows with good-looking gals? her father added. Or been to any fancy night clubs? He wrote that he thought New York women smelled “prettier” than anywhere. Did she need any extra money, for some little thing like perfume? When Amy next went shopping on Fifth Avenue, Edith asked for a pair of short white pigskin gloves; she could find none in Delton. And Amy’s friends at home, according to her mother, were always having a whirl. Wasn’t Amy sorry to be missing all the parties? Billy Walter continuously, it seemed, asked about her. Every letter of Edith’s ended with two questions: Have you met anybody? Do you have a job? With them, her mother’s handwriting grew tinier, and the words appeared on paper timorous.

  One day, in the jumbled window of a popular bookstore, Amy saw a sign asking for Sales Help. Inside, she made her way between shelves from which books were about to tumble, between rickety tables which were laden. Staring from beneath a heavy fringe of bangs, the owner wondered if the girl asking so hesitantly about the job had courage enough to sell books. However, she had a nicer appearance than many young people and was hired.

  Amy, thrilled, thought each moment would be one of intellectual frenzy. She was disappointed to be handed a feather duster and told to use it each morning. She was warned never to approach the men who read books at the first rack by the window, the sex books. The owner was sad, too, that it was necessary to sell trashy stuff to stay in business. Seeing people near the window reading and browsing, passers-by had the idea of coming in. Those who came regularly to the sex rack never bought anything. That bothered Amy unreasonably. She liked fairness. A morning when the owner went to the bank, Amy sidled up with her duster and spoke quietly to one of the men. Always, he wore pearl grey suède gloves.

  “May I help you?”

  When this young man swallowed, his Adam’s apple protruded as unfortunately as a growth on his throat. Gently closing his book, he set it on the rack. His mouth opened slightly, but saying nothing he vanished ghostlike from the store. Amy wondered if since being grown, even she had been as fearful and shy. She remembered the cache of beer cans at the abandoned house and how sympathetically Jeff had said, “Probably the only little pleasure the man had.” Another day an old man read with his hand on his zipper and gave her a hellish look out of sea blue eyes, brightening. Amy gave him a benevolent smile, though keeping at a distance.

  Monotonous time stretched without customers and all the books would be dusted. Arms folded, she stared up at the street, the store several steps down from it. Several times, she recognized Tony’s legs, thin and covered with auburn hair, and his sandals, always accompanied by a slim pair of feet in ballet slippers.

  Once, a handsome, blond merchant marine ran in for Jane’s and several navigational books, the names jotted down on paper. He was frantic and almost late for his ship. Amy darted helpfully around finding books for him. He tossed down by the cash register a large bill and told her to keep the change. Before she could ring up the sale he had disappeared. She held the bill, experiencing the newness of being tipped, probably for the only time in her life. She wanted to laugh, to tell someone. Only in the store at the time was Mack, the stock boy. She had never been able to determine whether he was Negro or Puerto Rican, and it had not occurred to her he might be both. With a diffident and defiant attitude, he wore, indoors, his hat, with feathers stuck in the band.

  Amy went toward the back of the store, laughing, the money in her hand. Mack slouched among the stock and watched her come. She stopped short, but his dark eyes remained on her and his mouth was unsmiling. She folded the money neatly into a square. “I can certainly use this,” Amy said, and sensed not to offer it to him, as she wanted.

  Desperately, all this time, she had longed to be friends with Mack. Did he know she was not prejudiced, that her accent did not mean she held the opinions, by now clichés, attributed to all Southerners. After all, she had gone to that crazy liberal school, but that was not explainable to Mack. Her attempts at conversation were always stymied by his refusal to participate. Habitually, she used the weather as an opener but that was where the conversation ended. Arriving in the morning, she would say either that it was a nice day or a bad one; either it was clear or looked as if it might rain. To whatever she said, Mack replied flatly, Yeah. Sometimes, his voice gave the word a little inflection. Yeah? he might then say. He did not show up for work and his telephone number turned out to be bogus. Wearily brushing back her bangs, the owner said, you tried to help these people, but they were all alike, and none could be depended on.

  This phrase sounded so much like her mother’s in dealing with maids that Amy was surprised, realizing she had been under the false assumption prejudice existed solely in her part of the country. She would listen more carefully now wherever she was. It was apparent Mack was not coming back. He had left them at inventory time, and Amy fought down the owner’s words, as well as her mother’s, echoing from her past.

  When Tony finally came clomping down the steps, she could not help being glad. Though after his absence, she was struck by his frailness and a look of insubstantialness. She could not imagine appearing at the Country Club in Delton with him. “How’ve you been?”

  “You ought to know,” Tony said.

  “How could I know?”

  “Every time I’ve passed, I’ve seen that tiny face peering out.”

  “I wasn’t watching you! I was staring out. Thinking.”

  On the edge of anger, her voice faltered; she was too lonely for Tony to leave. He leaned against a table, taking in that fact. As if in generosity, he said, “A guy I know, who’s a drummer, gave me some peyote. Want to come up to my place this evening and try it out?”

  Was it habit-forming? she wanted to know.

  She might get nothing at all from it, once, Tony said.

  She would give it a try, but acknowledged wanting no outside thing on which to be dependent. Tony patted his hollow-shaped stomach, having eaten peanut butter until it was coming out of his ears. And someplace else, he said, grinning. Would she pick up a couple of orders of spaghetti and meat balls on her way? He had some
wine.

  She would be glad to, Amy said, and meant it.

  Gladly, after dinner, she washed plates in the bathtub at the end of his hall, having first washed a ring from the tub. Tony, at the stove, boiled the root. Amy came back and he had a pot full of what looked like pea soup. Was the whole idea hallucinatory, that drinking the mixture would fill her mind with visions such as she had never imagined? One saw, Tony had been told, anything one wanted to—the entire range of architecture since the world began, for instance. Toasting one another, they drank.

  She lay flat with her hands folded expectantly on her stomach, thinking Tony would claim success whether he had visions or not. She could not find anything to think about. Enough times alone, she thought about herself. Once, she peeked at him, thinking how funny if he had fallen asleep. Though that moment, not surprisingly, Tony sighed; pearly gates might have opened ahead of him, she thought.

  She resettled herself on the mattress, wondering what to see if she saw anything. Her imagination stretched toward some broad subject. She might know, at once, all of the great literature. Then to her mind’s eye came the trellis full of June roses which had arched the driveway of the first house she remembered. Her mother was laughing and holding her father’s hand.

  A rabbit given to her some Easter, early in her life, came to mind. That gave way to colors of the rainbow always discernible when she closed her eyes. Tony sighed more blissfully. One of Amy’s feet itched, but she was afraid to scratch it. She saw the Court House, the old men playing checkers, herself alighting from the bus, into blankness. She could not, she thought, face things, even in fancy.

  “Fantastic. Wasn’t it?” Tony stood and stretched.

  With nerve then, she glanced at her wristwatch. Having been lying down several hours, she felt absurd. Nor was she going to believe Tony had experienced anything.

  “I just saw the sort of things I see any time I close my eyes,” she said.