The rains this week had washed most of the snow away, and the days had seemed almost springtime, with the earthy smell of spring, and the grass yellow-green. Now the night was a false spring night, moist and foggy.
I said, “Up in Thornhill, we’d still be trying to shovel ourselves out.”
We turned at a dairy bar closed for the winter and drove along a sad road of ramshackle little houses selling snowmobiles or second-hand furniture or home-baked bread. In used-car lots, bright plastic streamers hung lank and wet beneath floodlights. The drive-in theater’s marquee told us, CLOSED FOR SEASON, COLD’S THE REASON.
Grace said, as if continuing a conversation of explanation in her head, “You’ll wonder, she’s so young and three kids, but she had to get married when she was sixteen.”
“Oh,” I said. I wanted to ask whether or not her trousseau had been maternity clothes.
“My folks, it just about killed them, they kept trying to find excuses for it, but really they blamed themselves. They shouldn’t have, it’s one of those things that happen.”
“I’m sorry.”
“But they’re fine now, and they dote on the babies, and they helped Wendy and Arthur with the down payment on the trailer. Arthur’s a nice boy, Arthur Thibodeau, and he works at the Hull Textile Mill. They manage somehow, even though he doesn’t make much money, and the trailer’s lovely, I was astonished at how big trailers are. Wendy keeps it spick-and-span, despite the kids. Here we are.”
The sign said WHISPERING PINES MOBILE HOME PARK. I couldn’t see any pines, whispering or silent; I could see just rows and rows of trailers, windows glowing behind curtains. A strange world.
And I couldn’t imagine how Grace identified the trailer we stopped at, except by the old Chevrolet parked beside it. The trailer seemed to be aqua, but so were many others. Grace went up the steps and knocked on the storm door, which had aluminum curlicues on its glass window.
“Grace! Come in, come in!”
It was impossible that Wendy was Grace’s sister. She was fat. And her fatness wasn’t only the broadening of hips caused by childbirth; it was also teenage plumpness solidified into married stoutness. But above the distorted body in bulging slacks and straining blouse, Wendy’s face was smooth and young and pretty, her long dark hair carefully brushed.
“Well, hello there, Grace,” Arthur said, getting up from the sofa where he was lying watching the end of The Name of the Game. “Where’ve you been keeping yourself?” Taller than Wendy, he looked slight beside her, except for the beginnings of a paunch.
“You know how it is,” Grace said, “I’ve been meaning to come over. This is Emily Bean, she’s rooming with Kaykay and me at the new apartment.”
“How do you do,” I said, glancing around the living room. I had never been in a trailer before. Although it certainly was bigger than I’d expected, I felt distrustful of its size, suspecting things hidden away inside other things; the place made me nervous.
Wendy’s style was also traditional, a sofa and two matching chairs in brown-and-orange tweed. Was this trailer-traditional?
“I know,” Wendy said, taking our coats, “and I’ve been meaning to phone you some afternoon. Want to see the kids?”
I didn’t, because I never knew what to say to or about kids, but I followed her and Grace past the room divider of brass poles on which philodendrons (slips from Grace’s?) climbed, into the kitchen where the refrigerator and stove were avocado like ours and everything shone. Wendy hung our coats over the back of a vinyl-cushioned dinette chair and we went on down a hall. I was beginning to feel slightly claustrophobic.
Wendy opened a door, and we peeked in at a couple of little boys asleep in little beds. “Tommy is four,” she told me, “and Toby is two.”
“Aren’t they cunning,” I said inadequately.
“I want to get them some new bedspreads,” she said. “I thought maybe a plaid, or maybe sailboats on them or something. I’ve been looking at the Giant Store.”
She turned to a partly open door, and we went into a tiny bedroom. A baby slept in a crib. My usual dilemma: Was it a boy or a girl?
“A girl at last,” Wendy said, solving the problem. “Theresa. She’s four months.”
“Isn’t she cute,” I said. “And all their names start with T.”
Grace didn’t say anything. She leaned over the crib. The mobile of plastic birds swayed gently.
I didn’t want a baby, I’d never wanted one, there had simply been once in a while a certain curiosity to see what David and I would look like mixed up together. But Grace, I realized, wanted a baby.
On our way back to the kitchen, I looked through an open doorway into the big bedroom that evidently was Wendy and Arthur’s. Above the bed hung a haloed picture of Christ. But Grace wasn’t Catholic; Wendy must have converted. There had been no such situation when Susan and John got married, for John hadn’t gone to church since his altar boy days, and Susan, like me, had never gone to church at all. Their wedding had been the same as ours, the lawyer and the living room, canapés and drinks.
In the kitchen Wendy said, “Should I make some coffee? Or how about some tonic? There’s Coke and some diet stuff.”
What I longed for was something alcoholic.
From the living room Arthur called, “How about a beer, Wendy?”
So Grace and Arthur and I had beers, and Wendy had a bottle of Diet Pink Grapefruit. “I’m always trying to lose,” she said, as Grace and I sat down in the tweed chairs and she sat down beside Arthur on the tweed sofa, “but I never can. Arthur likes his potatoes, and I’m just miserable if I’m sitting there without one watching him eat his.”
I said, “Kaykay and I have to watch Grace. It’s agony.”
“That’s Grace,” she said, dismissing the phenomenon of Grace’s metabolism. Then she lit a Winston and said, “When you see Mom and Dad next time, Grace, could you kind of hint that what I want for my birthday is one of those electric cooker-fryer things? I’ve been wanting one for ages but I just can’t afford it. You can do lots besides frying in them, you can cook spaghetti sauce and heaven knows what. Norma has one. Of course, I need new towels, too, that’s the trouble with getting all your sheets and towels all at once at your shower, they all wear out together. I’d like some sheets, too. Permanent press. They’ve got them at the Giant Store and the Mammoth Mart.” This, I gathered, was a hint for Grace.
On the coffee table stood their wedding photograph in a silver frame. Wendy wore a long white gown. Her pregnancy didn’t show; she looked plump and pretty. Arthur looked sheepish. Beside the photograph were two champagne goblets, gleamingly polished, but the white satin ribbons had yellowed.
I felt suddenly trapped, as if now that I was in the trailer I couldn’t get out.
I said, “Could I bum a cigarette?”
“Sure, go right ahead,” Wendy said, and continued, her voice sliding voluptuously on, “Next payday I’m going to buy a new dress for Theresa, I know it’s silly, I’ve got all the clothes that Tommy and Toby wore, but they’re boys’ clothes and I’m just so sick of them and seeing Theresa dressed up like a boy. What I’m going to buy is a pink dress, with lace trim. Hey, I almost forgot!” she said. “We took some more pictures, get Grace the album, Arthur.”
She pronounced “pictures” as “pitchers,” and when I had to check myself from correcting her I was nonplussed by my English-teacher reaction. Good God, was I actually becoming one?
Arthur fetched the photograph album from the shelf of the brass-plated television stand. On the television screen, in Bracken’s World, a Hollywood world, starlets quarreled.
Grace looked at the pictures thoroughly, slowly turning the pages, and Wendy came over to comment on them. “We’ve cut Tommy’s hair since then…those are the snowsuits Mom and Dad gave them for Christmas, remember?…I don’t like that one of Theresa, I almost threw it away but Arthur likes it…aren’t they cute, helping me give her a bath?”
Grace handed me the album, and I lo
oked at round little boys crammed into matching snowsuits standing in the snow outside the trailer. After admiring the new pictures, I went back to the beginning and looked at pictures of the wedding reception, Wendy and Arthur cutting a tiered white cake, Wendy and Arthur feeding each other cake. Then there was Wendy in a maternity dress, then Wendy holding a baby in a christening gown, then baby pictures, then Wendy holding another baby who wore the same christening gown, and then there were pictures of babies and sand pails at the beach, of babies and toys under Christmas trees, of cakes with one or two or three or four candles, of Theresa in that christening gown.
I glanced up at Wendy. She seemed so happy. Could she really not want anything more than the wants she’d talked about? Could this really be enough? What would it be like?
“Well,” Grace said, “it’s getting late, we’d better head home. You come on over and see our place sometime.”
We drove back toward what was left of the evening: I would have two or three drinks, watch television, in my bed I no doubt would masturbate, I might drunkenly cry.
I said, “She’s happy, isn’t she?”
“Oh, yes,” Grace said, and didn’t say anything more until we’d driven through our rubble of new buildings and parked behind our apartment. “It worked out very well,” she said.
Indoors, I immediately got us each a scotch, and Grace made herself, perhaps for comfort, her favorite sandwich, canned sliced beets with mayonnaise. She turned on the television and we watched the eleven o’clock news, but I only saw it, I didn’t hear it, because I was wondering what it was I wanted nowadays. I hadn’t even tried to write; there was nothing but marking time.
I got up and went into my bedroom and took Ma’s diary out of the bureau. In the living room again, I sat down and read, as the Johnny Carson show began, about her pregnancy with Lucy. Lucy had been born in Butte, three days before Ma and Pop’s first anniversary.
Fri., March 29, 1907. Irene and her baby spent afternoon with me. Chester and I went for a short walk after supper. I felt fine. Went to bed at ten. Awoke at eleven and found the water in me had broken.
Sat., March 30, 1907. Lucy Martha born at eight A.M. I was sick nine hours. She weighed six lbs. Dr. and nurse say she looks like Chester but her coloring will be fair like mine. Everyone delighted.
I, sixty-three years later, went into the kitchen and made another drink.
“Come on,” Kaykay said, sitting at the counter. She ripped an application form out of her typewriter. “I can’t do another one, let’s get out of here. ‘Please state your philosophy of education.’ What a batch of bullshit.”
I looked up from my notebook. “I remember what floored me most was ‘List any physical defects.’ I wanted to put ‘no head.’” The defect was of course a bigger amputation. No David.
It was a Sunday afternoon in March. Kaykay and Bob were already job hunting for next September, and I supposed I ought to be doing the same, but I couldn’t bring myself to face what I’d faced this autumn alone, new town, new school, new apartment. Would I end up thirty years from now still teaching at Millbridge, one of those peculiar old-lady teachers living with another old-lady teacher? Lucy’s example was no help, because she had us kids and the house and Ned’s hometown.
Kaykay licked an envelope and said, “No head is perfectly right, sitting around reading your own diaries, you should be ashamed of yourself.”
“I am, but it’s become an addiction.”
“Have a cigarette instead.” She tossed me her pack.
“Thank you,” I said, yet although I lit a Salem, I continued reading. The addiction had started one evening when, reading Ma’s diary, I was reminded of the only diaries I’d ever kept, during a couple of years of high school, and I suddenly wanted to read them to go back to when I was clean and new. I found them, two notebooks, in the odds-and-ends drawer of my bureau, under the piles of manuscripts I ignored, under gloves and scarves and handkerchiefs and the beaded purse which once was Ma’s.
And there, in the diaries, was David, the beginning of David.
Sat., February 19, 1955. Carol and I went down to the Girl Scout food sale to work from nine to one. Carol brought the sugar cookies her mother had made and I brought the banana bread I made last night. The sale was held in Bea’s Alteration Shop—complete with no heat. One of the windows was broken, to top things off. So we almost froze. We took a break at about eleven thirty and went to Woolworth’s. I had coffee and Carol had a Coke. Then back to the sale. Fred arrived at about one for Carol, and they gave me a ride home. The phone was ringing when I got indoors, and I didn’t even take off my boots and jacket before I answered it. It was David Lewis! Would I like to go out with him tonight—plus Smitty and Mary Frances? WOULD I??? I was in bliss all afternoon as I lay on my bed reading Four Years in Paradise, by Osa Johnson. Susan and I made chipped beef for supper.
David and Smitty picked me up about seven thirty. Then we collected Mary Frances. And then we went to the movies. Africa Adventure was playing, and it was darn good, a film shot in Africa, but it was kind of embarrassing because the women in it didn’t wear any tops. Next came the funniest movie I’ve seen in years. It was a horribly dramatic little number starring Joan Crawford, and funny! I nearly died. David didn’t help matters any by making cracks at the most dramatic points. Smitty and Mary Frances were spellbound, and Mary Frances was even crying at the end, while David and I were practically rolling in the aisle. After, still snickering, we went to Nelson’s Dairy Bar, and David and I had chocolate frappes. Then we went parking, in the parking lot of the Outing Club slope yet. David was really passionate—and he’s so nice. Oh, I hope, I just hope—!! I got home at about ten of one.
Then all the many dates which followed, all the kissing and getting fresh, and all the words he said in parked cars, over the phone, and, after he’d graduated from high school and gone into the army, the words he wrote me in his letters. I had started to read the diaries casually, to see what I’d been like then, and I was concussed by the explosion of his words.
“I love you, I love you so…You’re starting to drive me crazy…I’d love to marry you…I think you’re the nicest thing there ever was…I’ll always love you, always, no matter what happens…Dear Emily, I’m sorry that I didn’t write you last night, but I missed you so much that I just couldn’t think about you out loud.”
Kaykay pounded stamps on envelopes and said, “You’ll get yourself in a state, and I refuse to make you any martinis.” Once when she’d found me crying in the bedroom she had fed me three martinis until I’d gone to sleep. She apparently preferred, as I did, booze to the sleeping pills Grace took.
I turned a page. From the vantage point of years, I was discovering the growth of David as well as the growth of our love, and trying to discover what had gone so wrong. Had he, instead of thriving on the love as I had, at last smothered?
“There,” Kaykay said, giving a final pound. “Let’s go do something.”
Grace was away at her rituals of car wash and then dinner with her folks. Bob wasn’t around, either; he was practicing his tuba at school.
“Do what?” I said. “What’s there to do on a Sunday afternoon in Hull, New Hampshire?”
“Buy something,” she said.
“Nothing’s open.”
“You idiot, all the discount department stores are open, one to seven. Haven’t you ever noticed?”
“What’s to buy? I don’t need anything.”
“Well, I do,” she said, and got up and went into the bedroom and came back with a list. She had many lists of things needed before she and Bob could set up housekeeping, everything from double bed and mattress to eggbeater (Teflon). Gradually through the winter more and more items were being checked off as their embodiments were purchased and placed in the attic of the house where Bob had his apartment. It was somehow eerie; they were buying what David and I had bought and accumulated, the things which now were sold or distributed between the families.
Ma’s
diary said, after weeks of house hunting while living in a Butte hotel:
Wed., May 2, 1906. We looked at and rented cottage. Decided to move in Mon. Rent thirty-two dollars, including water rate.
Thurs., May 3, 1906. Mrs. Foley and I went to Mont. Hdwe. Store & bot stove, refrigerator, and other things and to Lander Ftre. Co. & got bed. In eve Chester and I went to Mont. Music Co. Got a Hallet and Davis upright piano for three hundred dollars.
Fri., May 4, 1906. Went to Hennessy’s and bot dining set, etc.
Sat., May 5, 1906. Chester painted bedroom floor of our new house and we built our first fire.
Sun., May 6, 1906. Chester painted more and I scrubbed and we worked down to house all day. Went out to dinner.
Mon., May 7, 1906. Moved into our new house. Have to live in a mess till the floors get dry. Chester painted sitting-room floor. Slept in our own bed first time & got our first dinner.
Tues., May 8, 1906. Have to get up at six fifteen A.M. now. Chester gets up at six and fixes fire. I made white-flour muffins and they were good.
And on a memoranda sheet at the back of the diary was Ma’s list:
May 3, 1906. Furnishings for House.
Range
$42.00
Refrigerator
12.00
Washbowl & pitcher
.75
Hammer
.50
Screwdriver
.35
Coal hod
.50
Shovel
.25
Teakettle
1.00
Broom
.50
Basin
.25
One Minus One (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 8