“Oh, Lord,” my son said, and my husband said, “A writer, dear. A writer.”
“Yes indeed,” my son said.
I went out the back door and down the steps and got into Toro. I could see my husband and my son looking out the living room window at me, and my daughter came to the window of her room upstairs and said, “Are you going out? Wait a minute till I put on another skirt and I’ll come with you.”
“You stay here and cook the hamburgers,” I said. “There’s ice cream in the freezer for dessert.”
“Where are you going?” she asked me.
“I’m running away,” I said. “I shall probably go out west and fight Indians.”
“Again?” she said. “I thought you were playing the music boxes.”
“Someday you will hear of me again,” I said. “I will be running a bar in Singapore, or selling newspapers on a street corner in Algiers, or maybe a little old lady will come up to you many years from now and peer into your face and ask if you remember your mother and it will be me.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, have a nice time.”
I backed the car down the driveway and turned and headed out of town. It was five-thirty in the afternoon, very warm, and the country road was fresh and green. I am a writer, I told myself sternly, not someone who cooks and cleans and mends zippers. I am running away. I drove for about twenty miles and went through half a dozen small towns, but they were too close to home; I knew them all, knew the stores and houses and even some of the people. I have to go farther, I thought; I do not often go east, so I took the first road going east. It was a poor road, and got progressively less familiar, so I followed it until I came to an intersection and then turned south. By the time I had gone forty miles I could not recognize anything I passed, but it was getting dark. I came to a little town that had a sign saying “Settled 1684.” There was a broad village green, and a handsome old colonial building called the Colonial Inn, and all around there were split-level ranch houses and glass-brick stores. I will stop here, I thought, and drove to the parking lot of the inn.
When I came into the lobby there was a dining room on my right named The Old Cow Shed and a bar on my left named The Trough. I went up to the desk and asked the lady there, who wore necklaces of copper beads, if I could get a room. She looked at me carefully and said, “Aren’t you from around here somewhere?”
“No,” I said. “I’m from Rio de Janeiro. I’m just passing through.”
“I thought I seen you at the A and P supermarket,” she said.
“No,” I said, “I’m a tourist.”
“Funny,” she said. “Must of been someone else.”
“Yep,” I said.
“Going to stay long?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I may get an emergency call from my boss. The old man. Secret service work, you know.”
“Oh,” she said again. “Maybe you’ll recommend the inn when you go on?”
“Most certainly,” I said. “Muy bono.”
“All you Mexicans are rich, aren’t you?”
“Oil,” I said, and signed the little card she gave me. I signed it “Mrs. Pancho Villa” because I knew perfectly well she had seen me at the supermarket. She looked at it and said, “Glad to have you with us, Room Three,” and gave me a key. I climbed the little narrow stairway and found Room 3, which had a fine old colonial spool bed and a modern maple desk. I combed my hair and washed my face and went down the stairs again and outside, and found a drugstore, where I bought a toothbrush, three mystery stories, and a box of caramels. Then I went back to the inn and went into The Old Cow Shed, and a hostess with her hair in pigtails found me a table in the corner. I ordered two daiquiris in memory of Rio, and a filet mignon. Three times the hostess came by and asked me if everything was all right, and each time I said yes, fine. I read a mystery story while I had my dinner, and with my coffee I had a drambuie. Then I went upstairs and got into the colonial spool bed and read my mystery story until I fell asleep, about nine-thirty.
When I woke up it was seven in the morning, and I went downstairs and into The Old Cow Shed and ate waffles and sausage. Then I paid my bill and went and got Toro out of the parking lot and drove down the main street of the town. Just at the edge of the town there was a cottage for sale and I stopped Toro and got out. The cottage had a big garden with a white picket fence around it, and a path of stepping-stones and a little gabled roof. While I stood at the gate looking, a man came around from the back and nodded at me. “Morning,” he said. “Nice little house, ain’t she?”
“Yes,” I said. “Very nice.”
“Good foundations. New roof. All new heating system. Storm windows.”
“How many rooms?”
“Five. Three down, two up. Modern kitchen.”
“No,” I said, “it’s too big.”
“Too big for what?”
“Too big for me. I want only one room.”
He shrugged. “Some people like a lot of space,” he said.
“Not me. I’m a writer.”
“A writer? Like on TV?”
“No,” I said.
“Wouldn’t of thought so,” he said. “Would have figured you for someone with a family. Kids, you know. Baking pies and cakes and cookies. Would have said right off you were a good cook.”
“I’m a writer.”
“All right,” he said. “So the house is too big for you.”
“I was only looking anyway.”
“No harm done,” he said.
I got into Toro and drove off, back the twenty miles till I got to places I recognized, and then back twenty miles more home. When I came in they were sitting at the kitchen table having lunch. My daughter had made a shrimp salad and hot biscuits. “Hello,” they said. “Have a nice time?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Ninki had her kittens in the laundry basket,” my daughter said.
“Something’s gone wrong with the collar on my white shirt,” my husband said.
“The garage called,” my son said. “They said the vacuum cleaner wasn’t worth fixing and you ought to get a new one.”
“We put your records away,” my daughter said. “Dad ate three hamburgers and the sole is coming off my sandal, the white one.”
“Where did you go?” my husband asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Around the world.”
LOVERS MEETING
IT COULD NOT HAVE been accident, or a dream, or the quick small betrayal of the mind that caused her to hear the music; she knew that she had not turned on the radio, or put a record on the phonograph, and yet she heard it, clear and sweet and incredibly distinct, the words soft in her ear: “What’s to come is still unsure, in delay there lies no plenty…”
So began the lonely, long terrible night that Phyllis spent in an adventure that ended… but first, to how it began. It began tidily, for Phyllis was a logical girl. She took fresh gloves, she tied her hair in a knot, she put a handkerchief in her purse. But she went out of the apartment without turning out any lights, and she did not look behind.
If she heard the footsteps when she left the apartment, she did not notice them particularly, or perhaps they merged perfectly with the sharp sound of her own high-heeled shoes going down the corridor; at any rate, it was not until she stepped out into the lonely street, walking easily and consciously and proudly, that she heard the sound of steps behind her, coming as surely along the street as she herself, and carrying with them the echo of the song… “What’s to come is still unsure…”
Without surprise if not without fear she walked on. She walked quick and quicker, tense and alert. There were other sounds and she was aware of them, but also aware that she knew they were there though she heard nothing. Nothing except the following feet. And she walked without pause, yearning for the song to go on. The song said unsure, but it was sure, it was, it would be. He knows. So she walked through streets with crowds, faceless crowds, silent except for his feet.
If
he is following me, she thought, trying to keep her mind level, reasonable, if he is, could he be, following me, is it because he is trying to tell me what to do? Am I doing wrong? Am I walking toward something I should be running away from? Or should I be running away from him? Wondering, she only just stopped in time at the street corner, and saw almost without surprise that the taxi driver sitting in his car at the corner was gesturing to her and calling, “Lady, lady.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes. Certainly.” Her lips formed the syllables carefully, consciously. She bent from the waist, stiffly. And looked at him. A familiar face, she thought. “Yes, fa—” Then she touched the cab’s cold metal and the face changed. “This is no street for you to walk alone,” the driver said. So she got into the cab, without looking back, and sat in the middle of the seat. “The bar,” she directed. “Which bar, lady?” “Why, why, the Zanzibar! Of course.”
The driver looked at her fleetingly in the mirror, and then back at the traffic again; the cab pulled out into the middle of the street and merged into the line of cars going uptown. “Lady,” the driver said finally, “mind if I take you somewhere else? I mean, usually my fares tell me where they want to go and I take them there”—he laughed briefly, humorlessly—“but this time, lady, I really think you better let me take you somewhere else. At least, try to shake him off; he’s still following.”
The words clashed in her against those other words. The words did not fit. These sounds meant, why they meant there was someone who would say, “Hello, Phyllis, hello. Stop, it’s Jack. I wanted to ask you to go to a concert.” But that wasn’t it, that couldn’t be it. “… What’s to come is still unsure.” All right, my girl, she told herself. We’ll see. We’ll just see who will win. “Driver,” she said. “Go ahead, lose him, lose him if you can.”
“Right, lady,” the driver said. The cab picked up speed, moving gradually over toward the curb and then suddenly, unexpectedly, turned against a red light and sped the wrong way down a one-way street. “If I get a ticket for this,” the driver said, “you can have it, lady.” He turned the wheel hard and they were going downtown again, and no car had turned out of the one-way street behind them. Phyllis, shaken from the quick turning, almost laughed, in the back of the cab, to think that she and a friendly taxi driver were running from… running from… “How did you know anyone was following me?” she demanded suddenly, and the driver, looking at her quickly in the mirror again, said succinctly, “Saw him.” “Saw who?” Phyllis asked. The taxi pulled to the curb and stopped. “You’re okay now, lady,” the driver said. “This is where we stop.” He waved away the bill that Phyllis offered him. “Not from you, lady,” he said. “I’d just as soon not take anything from you.”
So he knew. She walked again. She skipped a little. She hummed. “La ci darem la mano…” And the melody fitted itself again to the voice inside. Goddamn. Goddamngoddamngoddamni. She let her pace break. Nothing could stop it now. Soon she would find it. It would open in front of her like a toy shop and she would go in and it would be like clouds of lilacs. And he would be in armor, damn it. And she laughed at her own audacity. Then she was at the door. A tall footman in wine-red velvet said, “How many, lady.” And she answered, “One.”
One. Why might she not buy two, seven, fifty-four, the whole great building with its lights and its flashing words and the tall red-velvet footman who bowed to her and smiled courteously as she passed; why might she not wander down the dark aisle alone, owning all she could not see? She knew abruptly that it was necessary for her to leave, go home perhaps, but not stay here, where the tall red-velvet footman bowed to her and smiled again as she passed him going out, as though he had not just seen her going in… and then he touched her gently on the shoulder and she half turned, conscious of quick movement behind her. “Pardon, madam,” the footman said, his voice very soft as befitted the voice of a man who spent all day on the immense threshold of recorded sound, “Pardon, but you had better hurry. You are being followed. If you choose, you may leave by the side entrance.” He bowed and smiled impersonally, and added, “But hurry. Please, please hurry.”
She nodded and moved past him. She felt his eyes follow her until she turned and went up the stair to where his eyes could not follow and again she could hear the steps. They were soft on the carpet, but quite distinct. And the music, too. And now she sauntered. On the left was a tall mirror misted as an old woman’s eye. And on the right wall a man regarding her with humor. “You certainly came just in time, so far,” he said. “Go to the end of the corridor and wait there.” So she went on and through the curtain, where for the moment she could not see, she heard, “Hurry, hurry, there’s just time.”
“Hurry, hurry,” the voice from the enormous screen picked up and mocked her, but the voice was wrong and the music was different. She went quickly, without consciousness of the darkness, down the aisle toward a door surmounted by a red sign saying “Exit,” opened it somehow, and slipped through. She went clumsily but quickly down the open steel stairway without looking back, and, once in the street, almost ran, because the footsteps were still behind her. She reached the corner just as a bus pulled up, and the bus driver opened the door for her, leaned forward to give her a hand as she stepped in. “I’m going home,” she said to him helplessly, and he nodded, without looking at her, and said, “I should think so. We’ll get you there as fast as we can.” She opened her pocketbook to find change, and the bus driver put his hand over the money box and said, “Never mind. I don’t want it.” He started the bus and she moved back to find a seat. The bus was nearly full and she went almost to the back and sat down next to an old lady whose lap was piled high with bundles. The old lady smiled at her over the bundles and said, “Poor dear. We all saw it.” “I’m going home,” Phyllis said, and the old lady said, “Of course you are, dear. I think it’s a shame. He should be arrested, I think. People like that.” She craned her neck to see out the window past the bundles, and clicked her tongue reprovingly. “And there he is still,” she said. “Following right along.”
Phyllis offered a strained grin that she meant for a smile and said nothing. “Let them try,” she muttered. It will be mine now. They know and they think I am afraid. Let them try to get me away. When I get home and can sit still I’ll have it all to myself. It will sing for me like a copper whistling kettle.
And she stepped out at the side door swiftly as the vehicle stopped, while the old woman leaned over whispering to the driver and the other passengers lifted themselves in their seats to look after her. And she went on, hardly feeling the pavement, toward home.
Did the footsteps still follow? She almost ran down the dark street toward home, but stopped suddenly; was that one last footstep, unable to stop as soon as she? “What’s to come is still unsure,” came sweetly and distinctly to her, and she began to run again. The door of her apartment house opened to her push, and she ran across the lobby, debated as she ran over to the elevator, and decided on the stairs. She ran up (was that a footstep on the marble of the stairs behind her?) past the landing on the first floor onto the stairs to the second floor, up to the third and down the corridor to her own apartment. Hastily, fumbling, she found her key and put it into the lock, opened the door and slammed it shut behind her, closed the bolt, and leaned breathless against the cool, safe wood. Ahead of her, at the far end of the room against the windows, a shape rose up in the darkness from the heavy chair. “You took long enough getting here,” he said.
Nodding, she went to the mirror. She let down her hair and brushed it. She took up the vial. “Such a tiny glass” she said. “No, plenty,” he answered. “There lies their lies.” The music swelled. “Drink. In delay there lies no plenty… In delay there lies repentance… What’s to come is sweet and sure…”
MY RECOLLECTIONS OF S. B. FAIRCHILD
TWO AND A HALF years ago my husband and I decided that for our fifteenth anniversary we would give ourselves a tape recorder. We believed that with a tape recorder we could pres
erve, permanently, the small, shrill voices of our children and, with the further record taken with the movie camera, preserve fond memories against the future. We thought sentimentally of sitting in an evening, gray, worn, palsied, and blessedly alone, watching as the projector reeled off endless series of pictures of our children dancing, swimming, shooting off fireworks, playing baseball, and taking their first faltering steps, and listening at the same time to their recorded voices reciting “The Night Before Christmas” and singing “Three Blind Mice.”
The glories of a tape recorder were suggested to us, first, by an ad in the Sunday paper, pointing out that a big store in New York where we had a charge account, was selling “reconditioned” tape recorders for ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, a saving, the ad pointed out, of almost forty percent. Although we observed that ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents was as close to a hundred dollars as made no difference, and was surely an extravagantly large sum to be lavished on nothing but a fifteenth anniversary, we were seduced into believing that a hundred dollars was little enough, after all, to pay for the pleasure of hearing our children’s voices in years to come, when we sat in front of our home movie screen. I wrote to the store in New York, which was called Fairchild’s, and ordered the tape recorder, asking that the ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents be charged to our account.
Since we had already ordered, that month, some coin books for my husband and a box of chocolate apples, our monthly bill, which arrived some days before the tape recorder, was a hundred and eleven dollars and fifty-three cents. When the tape recorder arrived I had to pay three dollars and seventeen cents express charges. The tape recorder was in a kind of wooden crate, and when my husband came home he and our older son had to use hammers and a screwdriver to take apart the wooden crate and get the tape recorder out. Although there was a book of directions tucked inside the tape recorder, there was no tape, and while my husband and our son read the book of directions and examined the various pushbuttons and spools, I went into town to the music store and bought a package of tape recorder tape. It cost me five dollars and ninety-five cents, and the man in the music store, whom I have known for several years, was quite snippity about our buying a tape recorder from a store in New York instead of doing business through him.
Just an Ordinary Day: Stories Page 19