Wives and Lovers

by Margaret Millar

  “Maybe they don’t appreciate nature.” Harold laughed, but no one laughed with him, so he added apologetically, “Listen, Haze, I get Saturday afternoon and Sunday off, and honest to God, I’ll get out there and dig those weeds and drown the gophers with a hose.”

  “You can’t drown gophers.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve tried.”

  “They can’t swim, can they? If they can’t swim, they got to drown, don’t they?”

  “All right, Harold, you win. Next Sunday you go out and catch all the gophers and we’ll take them down to the ocean and throw them in.”

  “Harold isn’t concerned with a minor trifle like the water bill,” Ruth said contemptuously. “Water costs money. This is desert country, and don’t you forget it. Everybody forgets that this is desert country because water has been brought in to irrigate it. But it’s still desert country.”

  “So what,” Harold muttered, very softly. He was afraid of Ruth because she sometimes said very intelligent and forceful things. Like that about desert country. Harold admired that. He saw himself down at the plant addressing the manager, or even the president. Gentle­men, said Harold, don’t you forget that this is desert country.

  Ruth took a sack of potatoes from the vegetable bin and began to peel them very quickly as if supper had to be prepared immediately. The kitchen clock on the wall said ten minutes after three, and supper was at least two hours away. But Ruth had a clock inside herself which never corresponded to the others in the house. Ruth’s clock ran fast and Ruth had to run fast to keep up with it. All day she ran, and part of the night; in her sleep her legs and arms twitched and she breathed so hard she woke herself up. There seemed to be no resting place for her, no safety zone where she could pause from the pursuit and catch her breath, no moments of peace except the rare ones when she was alone with the two things she loved best, the Fosters’ baby boy and the little mongrel she’d bought at the city pound for two dollars.

  The dog lolled against her legs as she stood peeling the potatoes, and the warmth of its body touched cold, love­less places and slowed the clock a little.

  Harold said, “I just remembered, a fellow down at the plant told me about some stuff the other day. You spray this junk on, see, and what happens is, it kills all the weeds but not the flowers.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Ruth said. “I don’t believe that about the jungle and the native women, either.”

  Harold looked injured. “Well, for crying out loud, I’m not making it up.”

  “You’re gullible, Harold. You’ve always been gul­lible.”

  Harold didn’t know what gullible meant, and Ruth knew he didn’t know. She stared at him in triumph until Harold dropped his eyes.

  “I wonder how much he charges,” Hazel said.

  Ruth put down the paring knife. “Who?”

  “The Mexican gardener that works next door.”

  “Have you gone out of your mind? Hiring somebody to do a little job like digging? . . . You must be crazy, Hazel. Why, Harold’s going to do it. He promised, next Sunday. Aren’t you, Harold?”

  “Sure, I am. Sure.”

  “There,” Ruth said. “He’s promised on his word of honor he’ll do it on Sunday. Won’t you, Harold?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Hazel walked back to the table and sat down with great deliberation.

  “Listen, you two. Who’s running this joint? Who pays most of the bills? Who owns the house?”

  “Well, I didn’t say anything, Haze,” Harold said anxiously. “I hardly opened my mouth.”

  “You better not. It’s my house, and if I want it to look respectable, by Jesus it’s going to look respectable!”

  “Sure, sure it is.”

  “And if I want flowers around it, by Jesus I’m going to have flowers around it, see?”

  “You bet you are, Haze.”

  “Distinction, that’s what I want, a distinguished-look­ing house with some class to it.”

  “People in our circumstances hiring a gardener,” Ruth said bitterly.

  “I didn’t say for sure I was going to. I said I wonder how much he charges.”

  “A dollar an hour, at least a dollar an hour. And a Mexican, at that. Why, I—I just wouldn’t feel safe in the house if he was out there.”

  “Why not?”

  “You can’t trust them, any of them . . . Of course I realize I have no voice in the matter. I’m living on your charity for the present.”

  “Baloney,” Hazel said kindly. Her irritation had passed. She was always happiest when she was following her impulses and her current impulse was to hire the Mexican gardener and live in a distinguished-looking house waiting for a distinguished-looking millionaire.

  Hazel rarely suffered from second thoughts. Once a decision was made, it seemed good, and Hazel stuck by it the way she stuck by her friends.

  A nice yard would (a) increase the value of the house, (b) look pretty, (c) show up the neighbors, and (d) pro­vide a suitable background for gentlemen friends.

  Humming to herself Hazel went out into the back yard, gathered up all the broken halves of beer bottles sticking out of the gopher holes, and threw them in the trash can. Then she went over to the house next door and rang the front doorbell.

  Half an hour later she returned with a pleasant glow induced by two glasses of cooking sherry, and a piece of paper bearing the address and phone number of Santana Escobar. She stood looking out of the kitchen window at the back yard. Tomorrow, Hazel thought, everything would be different; the muss and clutter would be gone, and the whole place would be blooming with gardenias and camellias, no more of those lousy geraniums.

  Santana. The very name sounded prophetic, a symbol of a brand-new life. She had no clear plans for this new life beyond the fact that it would be different from the old one, and that at some point in it her millionaire would turn up, or at least someone with a little money like Mr. Cooke.

  It’s the beginning, Hazel thought solemnly. It’s the beginning of a new life.

  She wanted to communicate this thought to someone, not to Ruth who would blame it on the sherry, or to Harold and Josephine who had their own new life cut out for them, but to someone like George. George was very keen on new beginnings. He would understand perfectly.

  She phoned the Beachcomber.

  “George?”

  “George isn’t here. Who’s that?”

  “It’s me, Willie. Hazel.”

  “Oh, hello, Hazel. This business about George, well, he left about an hour ago. Didn’t say where he was going, just walked off. There was some rumpus in the kitchen. He fired one of the girls. He lost his temper. You know George, he gets fussed up. Then, wham.”

  “You said it, wham. Which girl did he fire, Willie?”

  “One of the new ones. I forget her name.”

  “Ruby?”

  “Could well have been Ruby. Anyway, we’re short one girl and we’re short George. If you run into him any­where, tell him we’ve got a crowd here, will you?”

  “I’ll do that, Willie. So long.”

  Hazel put down the phone.

  In spite of George’s defection, it was still the beginning of a new life, and since Harold had gone back to work and Josephine was still asleep there was no one to tell but Ruth. She told Ruth.

  “You shouldn’t drink in the afternoon,” Ruth said.

  5

  “Ruby? Let me think a minute.” Mrs. Freeman paused, searching for Ruby amid the tissue of fact and fiction that enveloped her mind.

  “Ruby MacCormick,” George said.

  “Oh, that’s our new girl, yes. We get so many here. They come and go. I hardly have time to catch their names.”

  “I’d like to speak to her.”

 
“Now let me think, is she in or out? Wait a minute and I’ll go see. Sit down on the porch and make yourself easy.”

  “Thank you.”

  George sat down on a redwood bench beside the sign that identified the house: “Mrs. Freeman’s Tourist Home, Ladies Only, Reasonable Rates, Ocean View.” The bench creaked under his weight and he got up again, brushing off the seat of his trousers. He didn’t actually want to sit down anyway. He wanted to do something violent, to run away as fast as he could. But at the same time he wanted to have Ruby running along beside him, just as violent as he. He gazed blindly at Mrs. Freeman’s Ocean View—nineteen blocks down the highway a tiny strip of sea was visible—and wondered what he could say to Ruby to make everything all right.

  On the highway in front of the house, cars hurried north to San Luis Obispo and San Francisco, and south to Los Angeles and San Diego. George wished that he were in one of them. He felt split in two. Half of him was headed for San Francisco, but the real half stood on Mrs. Freeman’s soot-covered porch, nervous and scared like a gangling adolescent.

  Mrs. Freeman reappeared. She had taken off her apron, out of deference to George’s Buick, silk shirt, and masculinity in general.

  “She’s in. She’ll be right down. What did you say your name was?”

  “Anderson.”

  “Any relation to the Anderson that makes that frozen split-pea soup?”

  “No.”

  “I just wondered.” Mrs. Freeman was disappointed. She had made a habit of asking people if they were con­nected with well-known names ever since she had met, down at the beach, a lady who claimed to be a second cousin of Joan Blondell, the movie actress. Mrs. Freeman had relayed this news to all of her pen pals back east, changing second cousin to first cousin because it was practically the same thing anyway and sounded more interesting.

  “All these frozen things they make nowadays, it’s a miracle of science,” Mrs. Freeman said thoughtfully. “In my opinion, science is making great strides.”

  George agreed.

  “Some people think science is going too far, like this hydrogen bomb for instance. Myself personally, I’m not worried, though the other day something funny certainly happened. I’d bought this fish down at Marchetti’s, and when I opened the package it just seemed to fairly glow. I thought it might be one of those Bikini fish that got bombed. Do you think that’s likely?”

  “No.”

  “I guess not. I ate it and I feel the same. Here’s Ruby now.”

  Mrs. Freeman moved aside with reluctance and Ruby took her place at the screen door. Beside Mrs. Freeman she looked extraordinarily slight and pallid. Her eyes were glowing like Mrs. Freeman’s fish, and George had to stifle a wild impulse to laugh.

  “Ruby, I just came to—the fact is, you ran off without collecting your pay.”

  Ruby bent her head and the white skin of her forehead pressed against the screen.

  “I thought you might need the money so I looked you up. I had a hard time finding you. You didn’t leave an address.”

  “I’m not so anxious for people to find me that I go around leaving my address,” Ruby said with soft scorn. “As for the pay, that’s perfectly all right. I broke some dishes anyway.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “It does to me. You can take the money and buy some new dishes.”

  “Don’t be silly,” George said, scowling. “It’s your money. You earned it.”

  “Well, I don’t want it. Keep it yourself.”

  In the background Mrs. Freeman’s bosom heaved with pride. This was the kind of tourist home she kept, yes-sirree. Her girls might be poor but they had a nice noble attitude towards money. Still, if Ruby had actually earned the money, she would be a fool not to take it.

  “If you earned the money, my dear,” Mrs. Freeman said, “you’ll only be accepting your just deserts.”

  Ruby uttered a sharp little laugh. “Everybody is very concerned about me all of a sudden, I must say. It’s cer­tainly funny.”

  “All right, forget the money,” George said. “What I came for was to apologize. I was—I lost my temper and I’m sorry, see? I’m sorry. Damn it”—he turned his scowl on Mrs. Freeman—“isn’t there any place we can talk?”

  “Talk?” Mrs. Freeman’s eyebrows shot up. All her suspicions of men, some born and bred in her and the others picked up along the way of a life with the truant Mr. Freeman, were apparent in the look she gave George. Talk? Talk, indeed. I know men.

  “You can talk in the parlor,” she said, firmly enough to indicate to George that she would be right outside in the hall while the talking was going on.

  George opened the screen door and stepped inside. As the door closed his coat sleeve brushed Ruby’s bare arm. She shrank away from him, as if the contact had pained her, and ducked into the parlor. She bumped her shin against a leatherette hassock and almost fell, but when George put out his hand to help her regain her balance, she jerked her elbow and its sharp point caught him on a vein in the back of his hand. It stung for a moment like an insect bite.

  “Oh.” She put her hand up and covered her mouth. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean—”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “No. No.”

  “All right,” George said heavily. “I take your word for it, Ruby.”

  Mrs. Freeman coughed subtly and closed the parlor door. She was convinced of one thing—that Mr. Anderson was a fool to take Ruby’s word for anything. Ruby was a liar. During her fifteen years as a landlady, Mrs. Free­man had become a fairly accurate judge of character and she could invariably spot a liar, all the more readily be­cause she was such a plausible liar herself.

  Mrs. Freeman’s lies were nearly always written down in letters and were nearly always attempts to conceal her position in life or to justify it. She was a prodigious letter writer. She kept in touch with all her relatives back east, second cousins and nieces by marriage and even the new wives and husbands of divorced or defunct members of the tribe. She also had six pen pals, acquired through a pulp magazine: Middle-aged woman with cultural interests, fond of good music and literature, would appreciate hear­ing from women of similar interests, eastern background. How about a letter? California Caroline.

  Caroline Freeman had become a letter-writer for a number of reasons. She was lonely. She could tolerate her life more easily if she glamorized it on paper, and she could even sometimes force herself into believing some of her own highly idealized versions of the truth: “I hon­estly felt, Mildred, that it would be a sin and a shame not to open my beautiful home to some of these poor un­fortunate girls who have no place to lay their heads.”

  Occasionally she mentioned Mr. Freeman’s spasmodic disappearances: “Poor Robert had not been feeling himself lately and has gone down to Palm Springs for the dry desert air. With the sea practically at our front door we naturally get a good deal of humidity!” When Mr. Freeman returned, in need of funds, badly under the weather, and with his face cherry red from overindulgence, Mrs. Freeman recorded the fact that Robert had come back from Palm Springs with a bad sunburn and the desert air hadn’t done him much good after all.

  The ink that flowed from Mrs. Freeman’s pen was an unguent pouring over reality. It was true that she lived a few yards from the main north-south highway and had to listen all night to the purr and splutter of engines, the squeaking of brakes and the roaring of trucks. But it was also true that this highway had a beautiful and glamorous name, El Camino del Mar, and it was always a great satisfaction to Mrs. Freeman to write her address in the upper right-hand corner of her notepaper: 1906 El Camino del Mar. No one would ever suspect that it was a road lined with wooden shacks, filled eternally with the smoke of diesel engines and the soot from the Southern Pacific Railroad whose tracks lay parallel to the highway.

  At times Mrs. Freeman was afraid that some of he
r cor­respondents might come to see her and find out about the neighborhood she lived in, and the highway and the tracks. She guarded against this possibility as well as she could by writing to no one further west than Chicago. This al­lowed a decent mileage between reality and fiction. She was, moreover, fairly certain that none of her cor­respondents had sufficient money for a long trip west, in spite of the claim of her pen pal, Flossie from Florida, that she owned a huge orange grove. Mrs. Freeman had the same percentage of belief in Flossie’s orange grove as she had in Mr. Freeman’s sojourns in Palm Springs or the Sierras.

  No matter how many letters she wrote, Mrs. Freeman never suffered from lack of material because she had a keen eye, and she was an avid newspaper reader and an enthusiastic walker. She would walk for miles, especially after dinner in the summertime, consciously and de­liberately seeing things that most other people would miss. She examined each flower and shrub, every car parked at the curb, the children playing on the sidewalks, the evening strollers like herself. She watched the mountains turn from blue to gray and disappear. She looked into the windows of houses and saw the people inside, eating or reading the paper, listening to the radio, quarreling, wash­ing dishes, and she had a friendly curiosity about all these people.

  Afterwards, Mrs. Freeman described her walks in de­tail, always managing to bring in the exotic street names that she dearly loved. “I strolled up Alameda Padre Serra and over to Plaza Rubio, and finally ended up on Salsipuedes!”

  The weather was a constant source of material. Mrs. Freeman, however, did not content herself with mere temperature reports. She injected drama into a cloudy day by describing the fog rolling in from the sea, and into a windy day by stating that “the small craft warnings are up, all up and down the coast!” Calm, sunny days were provided with an element of terror by Mrs. Freeman’s favorite phrase, “earthquake weather.” The more beauti­ful the day, the more sinister the growl of the earth be­neath it. Thus, Mrs. Freeman’s correspondents got the impression that she lived in the crater of a volcano with the earth forever teetering under her house. This impression served two purposes. It made Mrs. Freeman feel that she did indeed live dangerously, and it discouraged her pen pals from planning a visit to this perilous spot. Flossie of Florida had even gone so far as to remark that she wouldn’t live in California for all the money in the world—hurri­canes Florida might have, yes, but an earthquake practi­cally every day would upset her nervous system. This statement stimulated Mrs. Freeman’s imagination, and she replied by return mail, describing how only that morning the whole house had shuddered, the windows rattled, and the chandelier in the parlor swung like a pendulum. She neglected to add that this was a regular occurrence, caused not by an earthquake, but by an S. P. freight train.