“Again?” Jannie said, and my husband looked sadly down at his plate.
Our two younger children, Sally and Barry, had already begun their lunches; Barry had spilled his milk and Sally was thoughtfully smashing crackers with the back of her spoon.
“Look,” Laurie said to me earnestly, “I work hard in school all day and I ought to have—” His eye fell on the clipping. “What?” he said. “I’m supposed to read this or something?” He read, scowled, read again, shrugged, dropped the clipping on the floor, and then said, “Hey!” in pleased surprise and picked it up again. “Hey,” he said, “I didn’t know old man Rowland sold cars. That guy?” He chuckled.
“You noticed that your friend has been sent to prison?” I asked.
“That? Oh, his old man’ll take care of that. Spike used to say his father owned that town. Boy.” Laurie sighed reminiscently. “We used to have times. You know that week I was supposed to be in my room?” he asked his father.
“Up the spout and charley wag,” my husband said.
“Right,” Laurie told him. “Boy,” he said again. “They ever get that concrete mixer put back together again?” He addressed his sister Jannie. “You should of seen it,” he said. “Cops all over the place and Billy and me—we didn’t know a thing!” He laughed.
“It was about four days before that boy turned up,” I said.
“Well, we knew they couldn’t find him,” Laurie said. “He could of stayed there a year, I guess.”
“Stayed where?” I asked, and my husband said, “You did know where he was, then?”
“Oh, sure,” Laurie said. “He was in our cellar.” He turned to Jannie again. “We had this Black Hand Society,” he explained, “and Spike would cut off two of our fingers if we told, it was in the rules. And we took him lots to eat—Billy got him a box of graham crackers and a bag of apples he hooked, and I got that meat loaf was in our refrigerator.” He turned to me. “You thought it was the dog, you remember?”
“Mrs. Simpkins,” I said faintly.
“Yow were too little,” Laurie told Jannie. “Boy, we used to hook potatoes and cook them on a fire, and Spike used to take us for rides in one of his father’s cars—”
“What?” said my husband.
“—And a couple of times we sneaked out at night and went to the movies, and once Spike’s old man gave him five bucks, and Spike bought a box of cigars, and—”
“Laurie,” I said, wailing.
“Oh, Mother,” Laurie said. “You always think I’m a baby.” With a show of vast disgust he picked up his spoon. After a minute he chuckled again. “Boy!” he said.
MRS. ANDERSON
MR. ANDERSON, WATCHING HIS wife pour his second cup of breakfast coffee, took out a pack of cigarettes and put one in his mouth. Then he felt at his pockets, one by one, looked on the floor under his chair, moved his plate, and finally got up and went over to the stove, where he found a match and lighted his cigarette. “Left my damn lighter upstairs again,” he said.
Mrs. Anderson put down the coffeepot, and sighed. “Thank heaven you said that,” she said.
“What?” Mr. Anderson came back to his chair and sat down. “Said what?”
“About your lighter,” Mrs. Anderson said. “You don’t know how worried I’ve been.”
“About my lighter?” Mr. Anderson frowned, and looked quickly at his coffee cup as though once his wife started worrying about his lighter, the next logical step was poisoning his coffee.
“About your saying it, and leaving your damn lighter upstairs again.” Mrs. Anderson pushed the sugar bowl across the table and went on. “It was this dream I had—you see, you said—”
“I am not sure,” Mr. Anderson said carefully, “that I am equal to hearing about your dreams at present. I—”
“But this one,” Mrs. Anderson persisted, “this one has been worrying me. You see, I dreamed that you never said three or four—I guess it was really three—things you always said. Three times in my dream I sat there waiting and waiting for you to say these things you always say. Like leaving your lighter upstairs.” She thought. “What I mean is, you say things over and over and this time you didn’t.”
“Please,” Mr. Anderson said. “Please, Clara.”
“Like leaving—”
“But I don’t leave my lighter upstairs every morning,” Mr. Anderson said.
“Yes, you do,” Mrs. Anderson said. “Every single morning you take out a cigarette and you look for your lighter and then you go over to the stove and get a match and you say you left your damn lighter upstairs again. Every single morning.”
Mr. Anderson started to answer, and then thought better of it. “Nearly eight-fifteen,” he said instead.
“I’ll get the car out,” Mrs. Anderson said.
On the way to the station Mrs. Anderson resumed. “I just wish I could remember the other things you didn’t say. Like at this corner you always say, ‘Doesn’t that light ever turn green?’”
Mr. Anderson, who had gotten as far as “Doesn’t that light—” turned and looked at his wife. “I do not,” he said.
“All right, dear,” said Mrs. Anderson. “It’s the ones I don’t remember that worry me, the ones you left out.”
“In your dream,” Mr. Anderson asked elaborately, “what happened when I didn’t say these things?”
Mrs. Anderson frowned, remembering. “Nothing, I think,” she said. “I remember in my dream I worried and worried, and then the alarm went off and I thought I still had a knife in my hand when I woke up.”
“Well, well,” said Mr. Anderson. He leaned forward and looked through the windshield. “Plenty of time to get a paper,” he said.
“That’s not one of the ones I forgot,” Mrs. Anderson said, pleased. “I remembered about the paper.”
“Goodbye,” Mr. Anderson said abruptly, and got out of the car. He went quickly up onto the station platform, turned to wave to Mrs. Anderson, and went into the newsstand. “Got a paper for me today?” he asked amiably, and then stopped, thinking.
“Same as usual, Mr. Anderson,” said the girl at the newsstand. “Lovely day.”
“Lovely,” said Mr. Anderson absently. He put the paper under his arm and went out again onto the platform. “Morning,” he said to someone he recognized but whose name he could not remember. “Morning.”
“Morning, Andy, what’s the word today?”
“Pretty good, thanks,” Mr. Anderson said, “how’s yourself?” and stopped, thinking. When the train came he stepped on so absent-mindedly that he stumbled and nearly fell, and inside he went without thinking to a seat on the left, the side away from the sun, and he had settled himself and his coat and opened his paper before he realized consciously that he was on the train at all. He held out his ticket and found himself saying, “Well, Jerry, feeling pretty fit?”
“Can’t complain,” said the conductor. “And you, Mr. Anderson?”
“Ten years younger than I ought to feel,” said Mr. Anderson, and stopped, thinking.
By the time the train came into the city, Mr. Anderson had decided what he was going to say to his wife when he got home that night. “About this business of my saying the same things over and over,” he was going to tell her, “about this dream of yours. I think you’re overtired,” he was going to say, “need to get away for a little while, maybe take a little vacation, go someplace for a week or so. Might even be able to go with you myself. Both of us getting into a rut,” he was going to say, “too much the same old round. Better get away for a while,” he was going to say.
Once he had concluded that Mrs. Anderson was overtired, he was able to get into his office without difficulty. “Top of the morning,” he said to the receptionist; “Well, well, another day,” he said to his secretary; “Daily grind starting again,” he said to Joe Field.
“Same old treadmill,” Joe Field said back.
Mr. Anderson stopped again, and thought. Heard Field say that pretty often, he thought, nearly every day, in fact. Ma
tter of fact, Mr. Anderson thought, every morning for a matter of five years or so I have said “Daily grind starting again” to Joe Field and he has said “Same old treadmill” back to me. Mr. Anderson began to wonder seriously.
Toward noon Mr. Anderson said abruptly to his secretary, “Do you think I say the same things over and over?”
She looked up, surprised. “Well, you always end your letters ‘Sincerely yours,’” she said.
“No,” Mr. Anderson said, “when I talk, do I repeat myself?”
“You mean when I say ‘I beg your pardon, I didn’t hear you’?” she asked, blinking.
“Never mind,” Mr. Anderson said. “I have a sort of headache, I guess.”
At lunch he sat with Joe Field in the same restaurant where they had had lunch together for five years or so. “Well,” Joe said as they sat down, sighing deeply, “good to get out for a while.”
“Don’t seem to have much appetite these days,” Mr. Anderson said, studying the menu.
“Lentil soup again,” Joe Field said.
“Look, Joe,” Mr. Anderson said suddenly, “do you ever find that you’re saying the same things over and over?”
“Sure,” Joe said surprised. “I do the same things over and over.”
“Ever find you’re getting in a rut?”
“Sure,” Joe said, “I’m in a rut. That’s where I always wanted to be, in a rut.”
“My wife told me this morning,” Mr. Anderson said unhappily, “that every morning after breakfast I say ‘Left my damn lighter upstairs.’”
“What?”
“Every morning after breakfast I say the same thing,” Mr. Anderson said helplessly. “Every morning on the way to the station I say ‘Won’t that light ever turn green?’ and ‘Plenty of time to get a paper’ and all sorts of things.”
“Lentil soup,” Joe was saying to the waitress, “and Spanish omelette. And coffee.”
“I think I’ll go home,” Mr. Anderson said.
He telephoned his wife before he got on the train, and she met him at the station at home. When he got into the car he said, “The one thing I don’t want to do is talk.”
“Something wrong at the office?” she asked him.
“No,” said Mr. Anderson.
“Are you well?” She turned and looked at him. “You look feverish,” she said.
“I am feverish,” Mr. Anderson said. “You turned too sharp at that corner.”
Mrs. Anderson winced slightly, and Mr. Anderson shut his mouth tight and folded his arms and stared straight ahead of him. After a minute he said, “You’re tired, Clara. Getting in a rut. Ought to get away for a while.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Mrs. Anderson said. “About the way people talk, I mean. And I sort of thought that maybe people had to talk that way, sort of saying the same things over and over because that way they can get along together without thinking.” She stopped and thought. “Why I was so worried,” she said, “was because if people didn’t say those damn things over and over, then they wouldn’t talk to each other at all”
“Some quiet place,” Mr. Anderson said fervently. “Lie in the sun, loaf around, play a little tennis.”
“We can’t afford it,” Mrs. Anderson said. She stopped the car in front of the house and Mr. Anderson climbed out wearily. He followed her up the front walk and through the door, put down his coat and hat and went into the living room and sat down with a sigh. His wife closed the door sharply. “I’d soon as not live with a man who doesn’t talk at all” she said, her voice somehow different. “Even what you do say is better than nothing.”
“I told you I didn’t feel well,” Mr. Anderson said.
“When I said we couldn’t afford to go away, you didn’t say ‘Life’s too short to worry,’” Mrs. Anderson said crossly.
Mr. Anderson sighed. “Life’s too short to worry,” he said.
“It doesn’t do any good now” Mrs. Anderson said. “Besides, when you got off the train you didn’t ask if it was time to change the oil in the car.” Her voice had become almost tearful.
“I told you I had a headache,” Mr. Anderson said. “I wish you wouldn’t fidget with that knife.”
“And when you left this morning,” Mrs. Anderson said, her voice rising to a wail, “I sat there and sat there and sat there and you got on your old train without one word except goodbye.”
“Clara, get control of yourself,” Mr. Anderson said sharply. It was the last thing he ever did say.
COME TO THE FAIR
AFTER A GREAT DEAL of most serious reflection, Miss Helen Spencer had decided that she was not going to the fair. “Granted,” she told herself reasonably as she sat over her lonely cup of tea at dinnertime, “granted that they need the money. No one could say that I didn’t want to spend the money for charity. No one,” she told the cat, who stared long at her, and then she bent to give one quick touch to his front paw. “It’s not that I grudge the money, not at all.” Having lost the cat’s attention, she addressed the teapot. “But what earthly sense is there in my going? I’d stand on the edge of the crowd, and say good evening to everyone, and laugh when everyone else was laughing, and buy myself an ice cream cone and maybe a balloon, and pretend I was having a wonderful time, and smile cheerfully at Mrs. Miller.” She lowered her eyes before the teapot’s steady regard. “And Dr. Atherton,” she said, “of course.” She broke off and sipped several times, very quickly, at her tea.
“Anyway,” she went on to the African violet on the windowsill, “who is going to notice whether I’m there or not? He’ll be playing darts with Mrs. Miller and everyone will be having a good time and dancing on the green, so why should I go? I don’t play darts.” She thought for a minute and then, smiling ruefully at the sugar bowl, said, “Not that anyone ever asks me, of course.”
She sighed, and perhaps the sugar bowl and the teapot and the violet sighed with her, since they should have known perfectly well that Helen Spencer was very lonely and, often, very unhappy, with the poignant misery that comes to lonely people who long to be social and cannot, somehow, step naturally and unselfconsciously into some friendly group; Helen Spencer was a lovely woman, to whose care was entrusted the fifth grade of the local school; she had been born and grown up in this town, and people who had known her all her life very often said to one another, “She’s a lovely woman—I’ve often thought of asking her over for tea or something one of these days.” As a result, Helen rarely went anywhere, and from the moment the first posters had begun to appear on the village trees (“Village Fair, July 25, 7 P.M. Come one, come all”) she had known she would not go, as she followed her quiet daily round from home to school to post office to library to dinner alone with a faint miserable longing at the back of her mind, and perhaps even the faintest touch of self-pity.
Now, at six-thirty on the evening of the fair, with the first distant sounds of laughter and excitement coming from the wide lawn behind the courthouse, where the booths were almost set up, and the lights tested, and the bunting fluttering in the early evening breeze, Helen sat docilely at her coffee, pretending not to notice the untouched dinner before her. She thought sensibly, “I do believe I’ll do my nails and wash my hair and go right to bed and read a magazine. I can always,” she thought, “say I have a cold, if anyone should ask me. If anyone should ask me.”
Then, because she knew self-pity when she saw it, she shook her head violently, said, “How silly I am,” and got up, intending to set her uneaten dinner away in the refrigerator (“I’ll certainly be hungry later,” she thought) and told the cat, who stepped lithely between her ankles as she went toward the kitchen, “I’ll do a penance for feeling sorry for myself. If the phone should just possibly ring—” and she hesitated, plate in hand, glancing hopefully over her shoulder at the phone, which was defiantly silent—“if the phone rings, I will let it ring seven times before I answer it.” She reflected. “Six,” she said. “Six times before I answer.”
The phone rang then, briskly, and Helen
tripped over the cat, caught the plate, set it down in a flying swoop on a chair, and answered before the phone had rung twice. “Yes?” she said. “Yes?”
“Helen, it’s Dorothy Brandon. Look, dear, you’ve got to help us.”
“I?”
“It’s Wilma Arthur’s mother. Oh, wouldn’t you know she’d have to do it today?”
“Do what?”
“Fall downstairs, of course. It’s such horrible luck.”
“Poor woman.”
“But couldn’t she have done it tomorrow? I mean, of course, yes, the poor woman, she broke her leg and of course we’re all terribly sorry, but of course look where that leaves us, and it’s already after six.”
“Six-thirty.”
“Six-thirty!” Her voice rose to a wail. “And if you don’t do it, I just think I’ll go crazy—first it was that Williams boy forgetting to order the ice cream, and then the lights in the grab bag wouldn’t work, and then that horrible trombone player—”
“A horr—?”
“He went and had a baby, I mean his wife did, this afternoon, and we had to ask the Hot Rock Trio to come over from South Arlen, and then Mr. French got mad and said he wouldn’t play his musical saw if he had to compete with a jazz band, so by the time I got him smoothed down, then little Michael Willis was going to run the lemonade stand and his mother said because he threw a rock through the Perrins’ window—”
“But,” said Helen most practically, “I can’t repair the Perrins’ window, and when it comes to playing the trombone—”
“Helen, please do be sensible. All we want is—what?” she said to someone away from the phone. “What did you say? He did? Just now? What is the lemonade stand going to do? You tell them if I get my hands on that dog I’ll—Helen,” she said again into the phone, “I really don’t have time to talk. Just hurry right on over and don’t worry about a costume because we have loads of scarves and beads and stuff. But hurry.”
Just an Ordinary Day: Stories Page 14