Border Town Girl

by John D. MacDonald

  Jeff kept himself in shape too. He really worked at it—swimming and tennis and so on. And I guess he had a sun lamp home because he had a good tan the year round. All of which added to the kind of impression he made.

  When you’re married to a woman like Linda, you develop a sort of sixth sense for those jokers who are on the make. We couldn’t ever go to a big party without somebody trying to hang all over her. I hate parties like that, but they made Linda sparkle. She was thirty-four when we met the Jeffries and looked about twenty-six or seven. People were all the time telling her that she looked like Paulette Goddard, but I never could see it.

  One thing Linda really had, and that’s a beautiful figure. I have never seen a better figure anywhere, on anybody. She had to watch her weight pretty carefully. She liked to stay at a hundred and twenty-five. Personally, I liked her at about a hundred and thirty-two, because when she weighed less her face looked sort of gaunt.

  But like I was saying, you develop a sixth sense when you have a wife like Linda. I watched Jeff pretty closely, worrying a little bit, because if anybody had a chance of making out, that Jeff Jeffries certainly would. But I could see that it was all right. They kidded around a lot, with him making a burlesque pass at her now and then, but I could see it was all in fun. And he was very loving with Stella, his wife, holding her hand whenever he could, and kissing her on the temple when they danced together at the club and that sort of thing. Which is funny when you think of it, because Stella Jeffries certainly was anything but a good-looking woman. She was just awfully nice. Really nice. I liked her a lot, more than I liked Jeff.

  It certainly surprised me that I ever got to marry Linda Willestone. That was her name in high school, when I first knew her. We were in the same graduating class. She claimed that she remembered me, but I don’t think she really did. It was a big school, about seven thousand total enrollment, and I was even quieter then than I am now. I worked after school most of the time, so I didn’t have a chance to get in on those extra things a lot of the others did. Linda belonged to a different world. She was in just one of my classes. I was shy then. I thought about her a lot, at night, but it would have been just as easy for me to chop off my right hand as go up and say anything to her in the hall between classes. She ran around with a gang that included all the big shots in the student body. I didn’t see her again after I graduated, but I used to think about her from time to time and wonder what happened to her.

  I got out of the army and got a job and a week later I saw her on the street and recognized her. I walked right up to her and said, “Hello, Linda.” She looked at me blankly. I told her who I was and how I’d been in high school with her. We went into a place and had coffee. Then I saw that she didn’t look good at all. She looked as if she’d been sick. Her clothing was shabby. All the life she had had in high school seemed to have faded.

  She said frankly that she was broke and looking for a job. She’d come in on a bus from California. It was a pretty tragic story she told me. Her people were dead. She had married a marine and he’d been killed. He hadn’t transferred his insurance to her and his people, Kentucky people, wouldn’t have anything to do with her because the marine had married her instead of a girl in his home town.

  She had worked for a while in California and then married an Air Force warrant officer. He got in some kind of a jam and had been given a dishonorable discharge and it was after that happened that she found out he’d already had a wife and two children back in Caribou, Maine. She’d worked some more and gotten sick and when sickness took her savings, she’d been a charity patient until she was well enough to leave. She’d worked just long enough to get together the bus fare to come home.

  They talked about the war being rough on men, but I guess you could say that Linda was just as much a war casualty as any man. What happened to her had just taken the heart out of her, and it made me feel bad to see the way she was. I guess what I did was pick her up and dust her off and put the heart back in her. You could call it a rebound on her part, I guess. Not a rebound from any specific man, but a rebound from life. For me it was fine, because I never thought I would get to marry Linda Willestone. I could still remember the times in high school when I would be leaving to walk to my after-school job, and I’d see Linda hurrying out to get into a car with a whole bunch of kids and go driving off somewhere, laughing and having a good time.

  They always say that the first year of marriage is the hardest. With us I think it was the best. At first Linda seemed tired all the way through, but as the months went by she began to come alive more and more. She was fond of me and grateful to me. I did not demand that she love me. I hoped it would come later, but when it didn’t seem to, I didn’t mind too much. It was enough to have her around, and know that wherever we went, people looked at her.

  It’s hard for a man to assess his own marriage. He cannot say if it is good or bad. Maybe no marriage is entirely good or bad. I know only that after that first year there was strain between us. Linda wanted a life that I didn’t want. I told her her values were superficial; she told me life was more than waiting for death. There were no blazing quarrels. My temper is not of that breed. And in the last few years things became easier between us. We worked out a sort of compromise. She lived my way, and when we could afford it, she would take a trip, usually to Chicago. That seemed to ease her nervous tension.

  I had hoped, of course, that we would have children. But that was denied us. The doctor she went to said that it had something to do with how sick she had been in California. It would have done much to end her restlessness, I thought, but since it could not be, we managed to work out a life with a minimum of strain. Sometimes, out of irritation, she would say cruel things to me, calling me a nonentity, a zero, a statistic. But I understood, or I thought I did. She was an earthy, hot-blooded woman, and our life was pretty quiet. I understand a great deal more about her now.

  During the past year she began to take an almost frantic interest in her appearance, spending a lot of money on creams and lotions, taking strange diets, working hard on grotesque exercises that claimed to firm up this part or that, remove slack or wrinkles here and there. That too, in the light of what happened, becomes significant.

  To round out this picture of Linda, I must add in all fairness that she was a superb housekeeper. I believe that was the result of her energy and restlessness. The house always gleamed. Though the food she cooked was plain and unimaginative, she always prepared it quickly, with a minimum of fuss and effort, and did her marketing with the relentless efficiency that made me jokingly offer to hire her in the purchasing department at the plant. She was good with her clothes too. Though she spent an uncomfortable amount, her wardrobe was much larger than even that amount would justify. The one project I completed in my cellar shop that pleased her the most was a special closet for her wardrobe. I walled off one end of her bedroom with mirrored doors in such a way that the doors could be completely folded out of the way, or so arranged that she could stand and get a multiple view of herself. I built in overhead cupboards for her hats, designed a long shoe rack, built in one set of wide shallow drawers that reached from the floor to shoulder height. It took me over two months of my spare time. Hanging the doors so they would roll easily was the trickiest part. Sometimes on rainy Sundays she would shut herself in her room and try on practically everything she owned, putting a lot of things aside for changes and alterations during the week.

  As I said, I had already put in for a summer vacation and didn’t tell Linda, because I was waiting for this idea of a fall vacation to blow over. One night in late March or early April Jeff and Stella had come over. It was when we’d finished a rubber of bridge and were talking while I made fresh drinks that Linda told them about her idea, and how Stu and Betty Carbonelli had had such a good time.

  “Betty said that you can get beach cottages for practically nothing on the west coast of Florida in October and November because their season doesn’t really start down there until
around Christmas. They were on Verano Key, quite a way south of Sarasota. They said they had the whole beach to themselves.”

  As I put the filled glasses down on the bridge table, Jeff said, “You know, that sounds pretty good to me. What do you think, Stell?”

  “I’ve never been on the west coast. When I was little we used to go down to Palm Beach a lot. Sis still has a big place there, but it’s rented every year through an agent She never liked it.”

  The bridge game was ignored while we all talked it over. I said it was too far to go for just three weeks, particularly if, as Stu Carbonelli said, you had to have a car. You could subtract six days for the trip, going and coming. A full week gone out of three.

  Jeff thought that over for quite a while, frowning, and then he interrupted Stella and said, “Hey! Here’s a deal. We have to have a car, right? We could rent places close together. I could fix it, Paul, so that my three weeks would start four days after yours. You and Linda could drive down and Stell and I could fly down. Then when your time was up, you both could fly back and Stell and I could leave at the same time and drive back. If we were close together, we would only need one car, wouldn’t we? And then we’d both have two weeks and four days down there. Driving both ways is a chore. But just one way…”

  “And we could put all the heavy luggage for both of us in the car, so it wouldn’t mean messing with a lot of baggage on the plane trip,” Linda said eagerly.

  Actually, Jeff’s idea made it sound a lot better. I didn’t want to take our vacation along with the Jeffries if we were going to be in an expensive place, because I knew we couldn’t keep up with them. But Stu had talked a lot about the place they had gone, and it certainly wasn’t any Miami. He said that the nearest town, Hooker, was eight miles from the key, and to get off the key you drive over a rattly old one-lane wooden bridge. He had said there was quite a bit of commercial fishing in the area. He had said you could eat, sleep, fish and swim, and aside from that, if you wanted any night life of any special splendor, you had to go to Miami or Havana. If the Jeffries wanted to make a side trip, there was no reason why we had to go along with them. And Stu had raved about plug casting for snook by moonlight in Little Hurricane Pass at the south end of Verano Key.

  Stella, who had been dubious at first, gradually became enthusiastic, and the three of them concentrated their forces on me. I brought up every objection I could think of, and every time one of them would answer it.

  Like I said, I’m quiet. And I’m pretty stubborn too. I guess those things go together pretty often. There they were, the three of them all heckling me. Florida had begun to sound better to me, but it was the idea of the three of them leaning on me that put my back up. I finally said flatly that I’d decided to take my vacation in August and go up to Lake Pleasant. It certainly dampened that party right down. Maybe I sounded cross when I said it.

  I was sorry to see Jeff and Stella leave so early, because I knew Linda would be gunning for me. This would be one of the big screaming brawls she could throw every so often, yapping at me in a shrill way that would make me dizzy.

  But it didn’t work out that way at all. She was quiet after Jeff and Stella left. I helped clean up the place, waiting every minute for the explosion. It just didn’t come. We went on up to bed.

  Right here, in order to tell how that night was, I guess I’ve got to explain a little about the physical side of our marriage.

  I’d never been with a woman until we were married. I kind of resented her knowing more about it than I did, but in some ways I was glad she did because it made things a lot easier at first. She was always moody about it. By that I mean that sometimes she’d seem to want to and a lot of the time she wouldn’t. It was generally pretty quick the times she’d want to, and the times she didn’t she acted like she was bored and just wished it would be over.

  Anyway, on this night after Jeff and Stella went home and we went up to bed with me waiting for the explosion, it didn’t come. She fooled around and I was in bed first. Finally, she came out of the bathroom and stood in the doorway with the light from the bathroom shining right through some sort of filmy thing I’d never seen on her before. I guessed later that she’d bought it for the trip to Florida, after I knew why she bought it.

  She stood there for a long time. As I said, I’ve never seen a better figure on a woman in my life. She turned the light off, finally, and I could hear the rustling of her as she came toward me in the darkness, hear the rustling, and then smell a new kind of heavy perfume she had put on, and then feel her strong arms around me as she brought her lips down on mine there in our dark bedroom.

  When it was all over, she lay in my arms and she said, “This is the way it should always be, darling. Now you know why I want us to go to Florida. I want a new start for our marriage. I want a second honeymoon, a proper honeymoon this time.”

  Well, I knew I wanted it to happen again just that way, and if I had to go to Florida to guarantee it, then I would go to Florida. It was as though I hadn’t even been married before. She was like a stranger, and I fell in love with her all over again.

  In the morning she called Stella Jeffries. I told Jeff down at the plant. And it was all set.

  Rufus Stick, the director of purchasing, tried to dissuade me. He said that the fall was a bad time to leave. But when he saw that I really wanted that time, he went along with it. We both knew that he owed me a lot. I devised the new spot check control of our perpetual inventory system and installed it. It works like a charm. And I set up the statistical control of inspection of incoming materials and revamped our point-of-reorder control system so that production hasn’t been on our necks in over a year. Besides, Rufus Stick knew that I didn’t want his job. I couldn’t handle the contacts with the top brass of other sections. I also owed Rufus a lot. He let me do my work in my own way, and raised me when he could. It was a good working relationship. He knew he had a loyal man under him who knew his job, and I knew that Rufus would protect me in every way he could.

  We settled on Friday, October 22, as my final working day and I would report back on Monday, November 15. As soon as that was arranged. I phoned Jeff from my office and he said he would get to work on it. He phoned me that evening at home and said he’d gotten approval to start his vacation on Wednesday, October 27, and he would have to be back at work on Thursday, November 17. It gave him only twenty-two days to my twenty-three, but that was because of starting in the middle of the week.

  I guess that he didn’t have much trouble arranging it because, from what I could hear, he was the fair-haired boy in sales. They were using him more and more on contacts with the advertising agency in addition to his regular job, and the new campaign he had worked on was turning out to be very successful. Contact work like that demands a talent I just don’t have. I find it very hard to talk to strangers. Once when I was in grammar school I tried to sell soap from door to door in my own neighborhood. I would press my finger against the door frame beside the bell rather than press the bell.

  It was about a week after that when Linda had the Jeffries and the Carbonellis over one night. Stu brought his 35 millimeter slides and a portable projector and we took down a picture so Stu could flash the slides on the wall. Stu kept moaning because he had to take his vacation in July this year, and kept telling us how he envied us. The slides were fine. He gave me a lot of information on the fishing and said he’d even bring some good snook plugs to the office and leave them with me. Betty gave the girls the pitch on the marketing and so on. They gave us the name of the man who owned the beach cottages and rented them himself. Jeff said he would write on a company letterhead and make the arrangements. The man’s name was Dooley. Stu said he was a retired construction worker who had built the two beach cottages himself. Stu said the only bad thing about their vacation had been that during the last week of it the other cottage had been rented to some South Carolina people with four noisy children, but if we wrote early enough and sewed up both cottages, we could avoid that.


  Stu and Betty had to leave early because of their sitter. We sat around and talked about the pictures and what we would take. We had a mild argument about which car we would take. It was mild because I certainly didn’t want to subject Jeff and Stella to driving back in our six-year-old sedan, not after the cars he was used to driving. Jeff was perceptive about it. He said, “Look, kids, I’ve got a new one on order for delivery next month. By October it will be nicely broken in, and there’ll be plenty of room in it for all our junk.” So we left it at that.

  Jeff heard from Dooley ten days later, saying that we could rent both cottages for the full month of November, and he would let us take occupancy the last week in October. He wanted a hundred and fifty apiece for the cottages, plus four fifty for the Florida tax. It was twenty-five more than Stu and Betty had paid, but still reasonable. I gave Jeff my check for my share, and he mailed the full rental to Dooley. Dooley wrote back and said he would be away when we arrived, but we could pick up the keys to both places at Jethro’s Market in Hooker, and he said that before he left he’d make certain that everything was shipshape at the two cottages. He said he hoped we’d have a good vacation, and if there was any trouble about anything, any repairs to be made, we should please see Lottie Jethro at the market.

  We had one of the hottest, stickiest summers on record. Even the baking city couldn’t subdue Linda’s enthusiasm for the trip. It seemed to mean an awful lot to her. It puzzled me a bit. I could understand how she could reach such a peak of enthusiasm if we were going to Paris or Rome or something, but she was brittle and nervous and quick, as though she expected the sandy expanses of Verano Key to contain the glamor and excitement of a royal court. I can see now how, in a special sense, that is what Linda went there to find.