by Sarah Dreher
"Tomorrow morning?" Shelby flipped through the folder and raised one eyebrow. "You want us to stay up all night doing this?"
"We'll make it late tomorrow morning, all right?"
Shelby shook her head slightly and muttered, "Slave driver."
As usual, that pleased him. "Absolute faith in you." He reached behind him for his jacket, then noticed he was wearing it and grinned sheepishly. Shelby hadn't seen David in a jacket since her first day here. He preferred the casual but hard-working look of loosened tie and rolled-up sleeves. Greeting new readers was one of his few official, formal functions.
"'Late tomorrow morning.' Famous last words," Shelby murmured to Penny.
Spurl stuffed papers into his brief case, looking at his watch. He snapped the case shut and heaved it from the desk.
Shelby reached for the door. David Spurl stretched past her to pull it open, creating confusion, a jumble of shuffling feet and multiple "excuse me's." She was always doing that, reaching to open a door instead of waiting for the man. She supposed it was the four years spent in a women's college that did it. At Mount Holyoke you were expected to open your own doors.
They all piled gracelessly into the waiting room, stumbling against Miss Myers' desk. The Dragon glared at them as if they had sworn in church. Even David Spurl was intimidated. Muttering about "'portant meeting," he swung his briefcase clear of their heads and made a dive for the door.
"MIS... ter Spurl," Miss Myers honked, "you have calls to return before you leave."
"Miss Camden, Miss Altieri, tomorrow, eleven a.m.," he said through the narrowing gap of the closing door. The leather soles of his cordovans slapped the linoleum.
Miss Myers snorted heavily.
Penny caught Shelby's eye and crossed herself.
"Eleven tomorrow," Shelby confirmed with a little choke of dangerous laughter, and pushed Penny ahead of her through the door.
* * *
Penny leaned against the sink and peered into the mirror, her dark hair falling loose around her shoulders.
Shelby splashed water on her face. She glanced up. Penny was studying her. “Something wrong?”
The girl shook her head and brushed at her hair. "No, I was just wondering...”
"Wondering?" Shelby reached for a paper towel.
"If we'll get along."
“I don't know why not. Unless you have some terrible secret... like you're a Russian spy or something."
Penny forced a slight smile. "No, I'm not a Russian spy." She hesitated, clearly having more to say.
"Go on," Shelby said gently. "It's OK. I don't bite."
"Well, it's really silly, but..."
"OK."
"But... oh, darn, I just feel so out of it."
Shelby squeezed the girl's shoulder. "You are out of it. It's your first day here. I felt out of it for at least six months."
"I always feel out of it." Penny gave an unhappy little laugh. "I don't mean to sound pathetic. It's just that I'm never sure what the rules are."
"The rules?"
"Of etiquette. The norms. The accepted behaviors."
Shelby realized she was standing there with an idiotic, puzzled look on her face and a damp paper towel in her hands. It smelled like old newspapers and sawdust. She wadded it up and tossed it in the bin. "I don't know," she said. "I guess everyone makes a mistake from time to time. Around here we worry more about our grammar than our etiquette."
"It can be really serious," Penny insisted. She reached into her handbag and pulled out a lipstick. "There are things, if you get them wrong, you can end up in a mental hospital." She faced the mirror to apply her make-up and glanced at Shelby's reflection. "Like shaving your legs."
"Shaving your legs," Shelby repeated.
"In France, no one shaves their legs. But here, if you go to a psychiatrist and your legs aren't shaved, they think you're schizophrenic." She waved her lipstick in the air. "And this. In America, women freshen their lipstick at the table in restaurants all the time. If you did that in Europe, they'd lock you up."
"I'll try to remember that," Shelby said. "You've made a study of such things?"
"I've had to. I think I've lived about a million different places. You never know when you're going to do something, totally innocently, that'll offend the entire population." Penny closed her lipstick, dropped it back into her purse, and blotted her lips on a scrap of tissue. She turned and grinned. "You think I'm a real case, don't you?"
Actually, she had been right on the verge of thinking that. She lied and said, "Not at all."
"Not at all?"
"Well, maybe that was a little strong."
"My father's with the government," Penny said. She pulled out a brush and went to work rebuilding her ponytail. "The Diplomatic Corps. We'd spend a year in one country, then he'd get transferred to another and we'd have to learn a whole new set of rules."
"That must have been hard," Shelby said.
"The Middle East was the worst. I didn't understand anything there, and it was the place where mistakes were most likely to be fatal. They dismember you for all sorts of things. Especially if you're a woman. I liked Africa, but it's starting to boil over. They sometimes look for people without families to go there now. Or the families stay home, but mostly they don't like that. They need the wives for entertaining, so they try to send them where entertaining still goes on. But not Africa."
Shelby leaned against the wall and crossed her arms over her chest. "Sounds as if you've had an interesting life."
"Oh, God, yes." She tugged loose hairs from her brush and dropped them into the trash bin. "It's had its good points and bad points." She looked at Shelby with large, sad eyes. "The bad thing is, you never get to really know anyone. At least, you learn not to get to know them, because you might like them, and the next thing you know you've been transferred and you never see them again. I hated that part. I used to pray my father wouldn't make the transition from the Eisenhower to the Kennedy administrations, so we could all come back here and settle down, but he was posted to the Philippines. My mother went with him, but I didn't want to."
Shelby nodded. "It can be hard, living that way."
"I guess so, but it's all I've ever known. Growing up in one place, where you know people and they know you for long periods of time, maybe your whole life... that could be terrifying, too."
Let me tell you about it, Shelby thought. "If we hurry," she said, "I can show you the place before lunch. That way you can meet people one at a time, and won't be mobbed in the lunchroom."
"Sounds great," Penny said. She twisted her hair back into the ponytail and secured it with a rubber band. "Though being mobbed in a lunchroom would be a new experience. I've been in mobs on trains and buses, even marketplaces, never lunchrooms." She dropped her hairbrush into her purse and gave it a firm snap. "'Whither thou goest,' as they say." She pulled open the door before Shelby could reach it, then stood back to let her go through.
Just the way they taught us to do for teachers back in boarding school, Shelby thought. Except she was being held for this time, not holding. It gave her an odd feeling, as if suddenly, without warning or preparation, her place in the world had changed. From student to teacher, from kid to adult, from...
She wasn't sure she was ready for all this responsibility.
Penny did all the right things. She showed enthusiasm with Connie, looked Jean in the eyes while she shook hands. She joked a little with Lisa, and—accidentally? —at lunch managed to knock over the salt shaker. Shelby wondered if she came by this skill naturally, or if her years as a diplomat's daughter had trained her to sense, without even thinking about it, exactly what would please people the most.
When she said she played bridge, Jean caught Shelby's eye and mouthed a silent cheer. Shelby knew exactly what she meant. With five players, someone could get a lunch hour off once in a while. And Connie would never opt out. That left four of them to rotate through three openings. With luck, they might even get two days some we
eks.
By mid-afternoon, Shelby felt as if her brain had been washed, rinsed, mangled, and hung out to dry. Penny had questions about everything she noticed and everyone she met.
Did certain groups of people always sit together at lunch, and why?
Some had come to the magazine at the same time. Some shared marriage and/or career goals.
Had all the women at the magazine already decided between marriage and career?
Most of them.
Was it a requirement?
Probably not.
If you planned to marry, were you dead in the water, career-wise?
Not really.
Probably?
Probably.
What had brought Shelby and Jean and Connie and Lisa together?
Shelby, Lisa, and Connie started at the same time, Jean played bridge.
Contract bridge or auction?
Contract.
Who was the best player?
Depended. Connie took the most risks, Jean's bidding was reliable, Lisa was best on defense—though she sometimes discarded the card next to the one she'd intended to discard.
How about yourself?
Steady. Not flashy, but usually make the bid. Might try a finesse if it can be set up in advance.
Does Miss Myers like you?
She doesn't like anyone.
When they finally got around to doing some real work, the day was half over. Light faded from the windows. Desk lamps went on, then off as the other readers finished their work and left. One by one, the desks were vacated. The echoes of their own voices grew sharper in the hollowing room. Connie wanted them to go out for drinks, and Penny seemed about to accept but Shelby put her foot down. "We have more to do," she said firmly. "There'll be plenty of time to get acquainted later."
Connie grumbled and went away.
"Did you want to go?" Shelby asked, having second thoughts and feeling a little guilty for having been so pushy.
"Good grief, no," Penny said. She ran her hands over her very own, uncluttered desk, and fingered the edges of the growing stack of read and evaluated stories. "Let's keep the momentum up. How many more?"
Shelby counted. "Four. At. the rate we're going, another hour."
Penny scanned the nearly-empty room. "This place is giving me the willies. Want to go over to my apartment? It's just a couple of blocks."
Shelby thought about it. It was quiet here. They could finish faster. And she'd always felt comfortable in the readers' room at night, after everyone had gone. When the radiator hissed and the night pressed black against the windows. She liked to sit at her desk, in her tent of light, and think or daydream. Sometimes she spent a couple of hours working on her own writing.
But maybe tonight wasn't a night for staying. Maybe tonight was a night for getting to know each other, and if Penny felt uneasy here... Besides, she was curious about Penny's apartment. From what one day had told her, Penny was a young woman who took her cue from other people, shifting constantly like water, to fit the contours of whatever container she happened to find herself in. Without anyone around to give her signals, what kind of container would she create for herself? What things had she chosen to surround herself with? Whose pictures were on the walls and bureau? When your life was rootless, you probably carried your roots with you, the way traveling salesmen carried photos of their wives and children.
But it would add at least an hour to the day, which meant that she wouldn't be there to take Ray's call.
Well, she wasn't married to him yet. Let him wonder for a change.
"OK," she said. She closed her notebook and capped her pen and stuffed the unread stories into her briefcase. "We have to promise ourselves we'll finish these. No horsing around until work's done. All right?"
"Yes, Mother," Penny said with a laugh.
The apartment surprised her. She wasn't sure what she'd expected—small, exotic items, maybe, memorabilia from the countries Penny'd lived in. A painting or two. Wall hangings or a rug. Pottery, figurines. At the least, posters. But there was nothing. Penny's apartment defined "bare."
It wasn't even an apartment, really. One large room divided into sections. A living area with a sleeping loft. A half-wall separating that from a wide hall that served as dining room and entry. A stove, sink, and refrigerator crammed into what looked like an oversized walk-in closet. The only door other than the entrance led to a tiny bathroom containing an ancient ball-and-claw footed tub, a rust-stained basin, and a toilet with a cracked tank lid.
Penny took her coat and hung it in a niche under the loft and offered her wine. Shelby accepted. If it had been her place they'd gone to, she realized, she'd have felt compelled to make a joke about it, or apologize for the "genteel squalor,” or otherwise show embarrassment. But Penny was unapologetic, and apparently unaware of her surroundings.
She curled up in the corner of a Salvation Army Contemporary sofa with drooping springs and hard, threadbare upholstery. There were no pictures, either. Or magazines. Or junk mail tossed carelessly on the coffee table. The curtained windows looked down onto West Sayer's main street three floors below. The sidewalk was nearly deserted. The few people still abroad walked with shoulders hunched around their ears. Though the sky was clear and black, a gray mist hung near the ground. The road surface glistened.
"What's wrong?" Penny asked as she handed her a stemmed wine glass.
"Nothing." Shelby felt herself blush with awkwardness. "I was just wondering, how long have you been here?"
"A week. I wanted to get settled in before I started to work. So it wouldn't be so hectic."
So she already was settled in. Shelby said, "Oh."
"There is something wrong. I can tell."
"Nothing's wrong. It's just that... well, your place is so... kind of un-lived in. I mean, it's really nice..." she added quickly. "But it made me curious."
Penny put a plastic tray of cheese and crackers down on the coffee table and looked around, seeming a little surprised, as if she hadn't noticed it before. "I guess you're right. I should have more stuff, huh?"
"Maybe a few pictures, some things. You know, to make it look like home. To make it look like you."
"Things. Sure, I guess I could find some things."
Shelby realized what she was doing. "Oh, God," she said in horror, "I sound just like my mother. I'm too young to sound like my mother."
Penny gave a little uncertain laugh.
She hurried to change the subject. "Did you go to college in the U.S.?" she asked.
"Only my last three semesters. Mostly I went to American Universities—Beirut, Istanbul, wherever we happened to be. Most of my credits transferred to Northwestern. That was convenient, but sometimes I wish my parents weren't quite so cautious. They were afraid something earth-shaking might happen to me in the countries' regular universities."
"Was it dangerous for a young woman? The places you lived?"
"I thought so at the time," Penny said, offering Shelby a cigarette.
Shelby declined.
"But now I wonder," Penny went on as she lit up and tossed the burnt match into a tuna fish can on the floor, “if I wasn't just buying into my family's way of seeing things."
Shelby nodded and looked for a place to put her wine glass. No end tables, and the tray of snacks took up what passed for a coffee table. She settled for the moth-eaten rug.
"The furniture came with the apartment," Penny said. "That's not my fault."
"I could tell. It's just like mine." Her mother had objected to her renting furnished, but Shelby told her apartments were hard to come by, and she was lucky to get this one. Little by little, Libby was replacing the furniture with tables and chairs and lamps she thought were more "appropriate", but the old stuff wasn't entirely gone yet.
"Know what I'll bet?" Penny asked as she curled up in the other comer of the couch and sipped her wine. "I'll bet there are these huge secret department stores where landlords do all their furniture shopping."
"There are,
" Shelby said. "It's called the town dump." She took a cracker. "Over in Bass Falls, dump picking is a time-honored Sunday activity."
Penny raised one eyebrow. "In Bass Falls? From what I've heard about Bass Falls, it isn't a dump-picking kind of town."
"It's a social thing. People meet each other at the dump. If you're running for Select Board or Town Meeting, you might as well forget it if you don't put in at least one Sunday picking."
“Americans," Penny declared with a shake of her head, “have such weird customs.”
They laughed together and sat for a moment in easy silence.
"We did good work today," Shelby said. "I take that back. You did good work."
Penny looked at her with those big eyes. “Really?”
“The way you pick things up, you'll be a senior reader in no time."
Penny sipped her wine. "I'm supposed to be your replacement, aren't I?"
"What makes you think that?"
"Connie sort of accidentally let it drop."
"Connie never sort of accidentally lets anything drop. She planted it."
"Why would she do that? To make trouble?"
Shelby considered that and rejected it. "She probably just wanted you to know she's the one to come to for gossip and information."
"Do you mind?"
"Mind?"
"That I might replace you."
Shelby laughed. "I assume I'm moving up, not out." She looked at the hobnail ceiling fixture that hung in the middle of the room.
Penny followed her gaze. "I think I saw that light somewhere just the other day. I think it was in the S&H Green Stamp catalogue." She gave a plaintive little sigh. "I really want this job to work out."
"You'll be fine," Shelby said. "I can tell."
“It'd be nice to stay somewhere long enough to collect Green Stamps.”
"Uh-huh, What would you get with them?"
