“You appreciate yourself least of anybody, Willa. You shouldn’t be that way.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“My mother always told us that before we could like anybody else, we must first like ourselves. You know, that’s one of the few things she’s ever said I could completely agree with.”
“It makes sense.”
“I like you, Willa.”
“That’s nice.”
“I like you a lot.”
“Good. Good clerical help is hard to find.”
“That isn’t what I meant. Look, come over here by me now and quit faking the job of getting the window up. Let’s finish the wine, then go to dinner.”
I let go a sigh and obeyed him again. Why was I so afraid of crossing him? It wasn’t like me to be afraid of making someone mad, particularly when they’d provoked me as he had. He poured the rest of the wine into his cup and looked askance at mine, still full. “If you’d get a little tight, I wouldn’t seem so drunk. I’m surprised at you for not figuring that out.”
“Oh yes, how thoughtless. Well, one of us ought to try and stay sober. Nothing to prove by both of us landing in jail.”
“We’re not going to jail, darn it all. I never figured you for a scared-y-cat. What time is it?”
“After five.”
“Hungry?”
“Yes, but I’m not dressed properly to go anywhere special. Why don’t I just go to Clancy’s and get some sandwiches and coffee, plenty of hot coffee.”
“I don’t want any hot coffee or any sandwich. I’m sick of roast beef.”
“All right. How about the Rice Hotel? I can go down and pick up some food, bring it back. It isn’t raining anymore.”
“No. I’m taking you out tonight. You look just fine to me, and if anybody says anything about the way you look, I’ll belt them.”
“I hardly think you’re in shape to be going out to dinner or belting anyone either.”
“I’m not as bad off as you think. Hand me my coat and let’s get out of here. It’s almost time to close, anyway.”
“Good. That’s the best idea I’ve heard all day.”
“Willa, is seventy-five enough? If it isn’t, just say. You can name your price.”
“That’s fine. You probably couldn’t afford to pay me what I’m really worth.”
“Oh, so you really do have a price, then?”
“I didn’t mean that. I just didn’t want to be accused of underrating myself.”
“Everybody has a price, Willa. Even you.”
“You’ve not making sense. Let’s go.”
He followed me through the door and I put out the lights. It seemed a long way between there and dinner, and it was.
An edge of the dying sun peered down on the steaming sidewalks as we walked to where Rodney had parked his car, a little awry in a space in front of the building. But car lights had begun to flash up and down the street. The day was nearly spent.
He opened my door with a cavalier sweep, then went to his own. He seemed always to be trying to prove he wasn’t drunk or even tight, and I wondered whether he sensed how uncomfortable he was making me, how badly he was ruining my day, which had begun as high as his.
I suggested a couple of places we might eat, trying not to sound nervous or impatient but at this point not succeeding very well. Finally he waved a hand and said, “No, let’s don’t go for a few minutes. I want to talk to you.”
“All right.”
“Look at me, Willa.”
“What is it?”
“Sometimes I wonder where all this is leading. I mean, about us. We don’t seem to ever get anywhere, do we? We just sort of tread water with each other, pussyfooting around, wandering …”
“Oh? I hadn’t noticed. I thought we were doing fine.”
“You’ve been happy, the way it’s been?”
“Happy? I’m not even sure I know the meaning of the word. Content, I guess. Yes, content. I know I haven’t wanted it to stop.”
“Me either. That’s all I’ve really ever known for sure. But I’m not sure I know why—or even if it matters very much.”
“You’ve been good for me.”
“I’ve only believed in you a little. It was all you needed, someone to believe in you and make you realize you ought to pay yourself the same service.”
“Maybe you’re right, I don’t know. You seem—until today—always to expect the right thing of me. No one has ever ‘expected’ things from me—good things. Not even my parents. I think they always expected the worst.”
“Maybe that’s why you’ve always been so hell-bent on giving it to them.”
“Maybe.”
“Willa, I think I might love you. A little, anyway.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that I’m different. You can’t tell. You said it was love with Rosemarie. Maybe this isn’t the same thing.”
“Is that how you feel?”
“I don’t know how I feel, Rodney. Look how dark it’s gotten. Once it starts, it comes so fast.”
“Yes,” he said softly, and I imagined the air outside after the stuffiness of the office had sobered him some. Certainly he was talking more coherently, whether or not he’d remember any of it tomorrow.
“Willa, couldn’t you just come to me a little? I’ve wanted so much to hold you more, but you’re so aloof. I want to kiss you right now. I very much want to now.”
“What’s stopping you, Rodney?”
“Maybe nothing at all, maybe everything,” he said, and leaned toward me and kissed me like the time before, sweetly, unassumingly. I felt safe again for a moment … two … then he seemed to have decided something on his own and he kissed me again, only this time more forcefully. I was trying to be responsive, not to mind the wine on his breath or the way he was holding me, but he was getting out of hand. I could feel his teeth pressing behind his lips and he seemed to be gripping me tighter with each moment, exploring me like a high school boy. He kept going and kept going, after things had started out sort of ill at ease and I’d been fooled into thinking it would come to nothing.
Then he was doing something that brought it all back, Cliff Wagner and the Stutz Bearcat and the abrupt way he’d come for what he was after. My blouse was coming undone and he was whispering my name over and over in my ear and I was trying to stop him, God, had his hands ever been so strong? And before I knew it I was screaming in panic, “No, no, leave me alone, let me out of the car!” and forcing with all my might his leg off mine and his hand off my breast, and thinking how stupid I’d been to let it happen again.
He did stop then, I think a little sooner than it seemed, and leaned his head back against the seat. “Oh, Willa, I’m going to be sick. You’d better drive this heap somewhere and let me out.”
“All right. Scoot over to this side.” I got out and walked around, and the air felt so clean, so refreshing, like waking up after a terrible dream and finding it wasn’t real after all. Except that it was. I got in and started the car and we drove home. By the time we reached Montrose he’d decided he could drive on to his house alone, but after telling me that he said nothing else and we rode on through the semi-darkness to the curb in front of my house.
I was angry, and the cattiness surfaced again. I left the car and looked at him through the window. “Don’t expect me tomorrow,” I said.
How tiresome. A blue Daimler in the driveway. The Crosthwaites for dinner and I’d forgotten. All I wanted to do was bathe my face and go to bed.
Maybelle met me at the door in her inevitable blue middy dress, her usual look of puppy dog anxiousness to please written all over her face.
“Hello, Maybelle,” I said with exaggerated flatness. I was in no mood for pretending to be pleased at her presence. Mother and Dad and the Crosthwaites were in the parlor having tomato juice with lemon, the prohibition cocktail at our house when company is around. Though Dad has a “prescription” at the drugstore for liquor as a mild pain reliever, his stock us
ually remains in the cedar chest unless he is drinking alone or with close friends, and he does not consider the Crosthwaites good friends, no matter what my mother feels.
Velma was holding forth before the fireplace, talking about some committee she was working on for the coming Grand Opera season. Even if I’d not overheard her voice, penetrating as the blare of an alphorn at close range, I’d have known she was up there dominating the conversation. Velma is tall and ungainly, buxom, with wavy iron gray hair and deep-set eyes. She always wears large dangling earrings and lipstick that divides into squares along her wrinkled mouth. Velma has always had a wrinkled mouth. As far as I know, everyone has noticed it except her.
Mother’s voice tripped across Velma’s deep tones. “Is that you, Willa? Come in and say hello to Velma and Carter. Dinner’s almost ready—Julia’s made oyster bisque to kick off the oyster season.”
“And lemon pie,” Maybelle whispered in my ear, as though imparting some sensuous secret.
“Good evening,” I told them, nodding at everyone in a sweeping glance. Carter was seated next to Dad on a sofa across from where Velma stood. He is a slight, balding man, shorter by inches than Velma and henpecked so much by her at home and in public that Dad says, while working at his investment job, he is brash and overbearing, probably trying to make up for the beating he takes from his wife. Dad told me this privately, of course. Should anyone say a disparaging word against Velma in front of Mother, she would be angry for days, and I have often thought even before the days just past that Mother is more influenced by Velma Crosthwaite than by my father.
On any other night I could have made it all right through oyster bisque, but on that evening I simply had to extricate myself from the sheer dullness of dinner with them.
“Mother, I hope you won’t mind, but I’m not feeling very well. Upset stomach, you know. I think I’ll skip dinner and go straight to bed.”
It sounded pretty good to me as I said it, but Velma looked suspicious right away, and Carter shuffled his feet and looked down at the floor. Dad busied himself pulling a cigar from its case on the lamp table.
“Of course, if you’re not feeling well,” Mother said. “Not even?—oh well, go along, then. I’ll come up after while to check on—”
“It won’t be necessary, probably something I ate for lunch. All of you go on and enjoy the evening.”
Maybelle insisted upon walking up the stairs alongside me. “How could you? Leaving me with the four of them. Oh, you are a cruel and vicious being, Willa, and cowardly too.” She murmured this with no malice, only her usual degree of matter-of-factness. Somehow I had to be nice to the pimply-faced, bespectacled girl, the sooner to get away from her and the rest of them.
“Look, I really meant what I said. Sorry. Would you mind letting me by?”
“May I just come in, turn down the bed, visit for a while … after dinner, I mean?”
“I’ll probably go right to sleep. I’ve had an exhausting day. We’ll go to the show next week, all right?”
“Yes, Mother said you were working in that real estate office with that man. Wish I had an interesting job like that. Oh, but a show would be marvelous. Call me?”
“Of course.”
“Good. Hope you feel better. I’ll see they leave some lemon pie for you …”
This was a generous concession for Maybelle. She was but a year my junior, yet somehow had never grown up. Eating was her favorite pastime, as evidenced by her still pudgy figure.
Cool water rushing over my hot face, soap on a soft washrag.
I checked the blouse to see if anything was torn or any buttons missing, and, finding none, closed my suit coat again. Rodney was not so rude as Cliff Wagner, of course. What he had done was out of … well, a kind of longing, I guess, whereas Cliff’s advances had been fiendishly calculated.
I changed into a nightgown and got into bed, though it wasn’t yet seven-thirty and I wasn’t sleepy, or at least was beyond the point of unwinding sufficiently to doze off. So I stared at the wall for a while, and lit up a cigarette, took one puff, squashed it into the ashtray, then turned out the light and stared some more. When I am gone, I thought, my tombstone will read, “Here lies Willa Katherine Frazier [always remained a Frazier], a cold bitch who died as she lived … alone.” It was funny thinking of that, and I turned my face to the pillow so no one downstairs would overhear my giggling, but then the tears smarted behind my eyes and I knew the only amusing part of the tombstone was its irony.
Why could I not open up to anyone? Not even to Rodney, who saw beyond the mask? I wanted to open up, really, wanted it more than anything. But when matters began to get serious I was frightened, so frightened I would always panic just like today. I could have handled it better, more adult-like, without spouting off about not coming to the office tomorrow. But at that moment I hated Rodney Younger neck and crop. Now, only minutes later, I didn’t know. It was as though all my feelings for him—whatever they were—had been muffled, covered over by a heavy quilt and hidden somewhere in the far reaches … Was that the door?
“Who is it?” I asked, expecting Maybelle. Worse still, it was Mother.
“Willa, dear, are you all right?” she asked, and sat on the edge of the bed. “Let’s feel that forehead … no fever, that’s good. Is it your stomach? Did you take a powder?”
“No, you know I hate taking things. I’ll just sleep it off.”
“It’s Rodney, isn’t it? You and he had a quarrel. Did you work it out all right? You didn’t break it off, did you?”
I leaned back against the pillow and considered for a moment. “I really think you’d be disappointed if I had.”
“Well, he is a nice boy and all, dear. I just wondered. Of course it’s entirely your business.”
“Well, the truth is, I don’t know yet. But don’t wake me tomorrow. I’m taking the day off.”
“All right. You have worked awfully hard for him, haven’t you? Bernie says he thinks you’ve become very interested in real estate, as you never were in his business.”
“It’s nothing, Mother. I just ate something that set my stomach off. Just leave it at that, will you? You’d better get downstairs, they’ll be missing you.”
“Oh, all right. Don’t think you’ve fooled me, though. I know you’re holding back as always.” She sighed heavily and moved away. “Sure you wouldn’t like Julia to bring you a tray?”
“No. I’ve no appetite. And don’t save me anything. Give all the leftovers to Maybelle. She loves to eat.”
“That’s unkind, Willa.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
She left the room and closed the door quietly, the soft folds of her long dress brushing the floor behind.
I didn’t work the next day, nor all the rest of the week. Truthfully, I didn’t feel well, though it was nothing one could put a name to. It was easy enough to use the semi-illness as an excuse, though, and not to have to explain any more to Mother. No word from Rodney, not even a phone call. Maybe he felt we’d best stay clear of each other for a while, or maybe he was too busy picking up all the clerical work at the office, or too busy out in the field. Maybe he was just fed up. Why did I wish he wouldn’t be so stubborn, and call?
Saturday morning he came.
I was up early and happened to be looking out the window, brushing my hair, when I saw him drive up. I concealed myself behind the fluttering curtain and waited until he’d gone up to the porch. In a few minutes Mother was knocking at my bedroom door.
“I know who it is, Mother. Tell him of course I’ll see him. I’ll be down in a moment.”
She said nothing, and I heard her footsteps down the hall. A week had done my old sense of coyness a lot of good. I should better be able to face Rodney Younger. I felt completely detached.
He was seated in the parlor on the edge of the sofa, looking pitiful. Had he slept since Monday? He didn’t look it. I hadn’t expected him to have been suffering so much and the surprise of it threw me off guard and tempo
rarily dispelled my determination to be flippant.
“You look terrible. Are you all right?”
I sat down next to him, in perfect command even still.
He looked at me pleadingly. “Oh, Willa, it’s been a horrible week. I’ve missed you so much. Can you ever forgive my behavior? I know I was just awful.”
“Forget it.”
“No, I can’t. There I was like some kind of animal, pawing at you. Lord, no wonder you were put out—anybody would have been. Please say you’ll forgive me.”
“Of course. It hasn’t bothered me. I’ve been sick.”
“Oh, you poor dear,” he said, taking my hands in his. “You look fit, though. Are you all right now?”
“Perfectly. I may even come back to work Monday, if you still want me.”
“Listen, Willa, that’s up to you. But one thing I wanted to try and explain today was the reason for the way I acted the other day. Do you know why I got drunk? Not out of reckless pleasure about what had happened or anything. I’m not the sort for that, never have been.
“It kept gnawing at me, that’s all … my father. How happy he’d have been to have been a part of it all. One of the houses that sold was a property he’d gotten shortly before Thanksgiving. He worked like the dickens trying to unload it, and the customer who finally bought it had orginally talked with him on it months ago. So you see, all the success wasn’t mine, and yet he wasn’t there to share even a part of it. God, how I miss him. Can you understand that?”
“Maybe I can, a little. But you can’t make yourself miserable over it. You can’t bring him back, Rodney. You can’t live your life feeling guilty over whatever happiness or success you enjoy, just because you think he might have had a hand in it. Do you think he’d want that?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Well, I know he wouldn’t. Your dad wasn’t that way.”
“You liked him, didn’t you?”
“Of course. Who wouldn’t have? He was kind, straightforward. I liked him or I would have never spent so many of my Friday nights forbearing your mother’s probing or her looks of disapproval.”
“You just have to try and understand Mother, Willa. She’s really not so bad. Just kind of confused.”
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