The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  “I thought you might need some help. My wife and I—”

  He broke off. The smile had flashed out, but now it was not the appeasing, uneasy smile he remembered. It was ironic, maledictory.

  He went on, doggedly, “talked about you”—why was he telling such a lie?—“and I thought, after Jake told me about you, you might not know many people, you might need a job…” his voice trailed off. Why couldn’t he say an honest word?

  “I’m married too,” she said, speaking tonelessly so that her statement seemed no more than a token to match his, as though they were about to start a game and each one must assure the other there was a manikin in his corner. The import of what she said hit him suddenly. He looked around the room as though Annie’s husband might be there, hidden in the shadows.

  “I don’t know where he is,” she said. “I haven’t heard for a long while. Murmansk perhaps.”

  “Murmansk!”

  “He’s a seaman.”

  “The man you were going to meet that day?”

  “Yes. That one.”

  “You look ill.”

  She looked exhausted as though she’d been kept up all night by some savagery in another room of this miserable little house. Yet her youth was plain to see; the whole balance of her body, slumped over as she was, one hand against her stomach, belied her weariness. She shook her head and bent farther over, then gripped her belly; he watched, panicked, helpless. Then she looked up, her eyes again so wide they appeared, for a moment, to be lidless.

  “What is it?” he cried.

  “No, no…”

  She stood up suddenly. “Can I make you some coffee?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I don’t think I have any in any case.”

  “Why is he in Murmansk?”

  “I don’t know that he is. But he said he might go the Murmansk run. The bonus is big. The money…that was it.” She sat down again on the corner of the bed, twisting her feet beneath the covers on the floor. “I’d like to find my shoes and put them on,” she said timidly. He understood she didn’t want him to observe her in this commonplace act. “Aren’t those shoes?” he asked pointing to a pair of huaraches under the sink.

  She went quickly and took them up and slipped them on, her back to him. She was taller than he’d remembered but he knew she’d not been so ribby, so gaunt.

  “Jake said you had a dreadful job.”

  “Oh, that was then. I’ve had a lot more since I saw Jake. They’ve all been pretty much the same. Worm jobs, for the worms.”

  “Don’t think that way.”

  “How shall I think?”

  “It’s hard to find work—if you’re not trained for anything special. And the Depression isn’t really over yet.”

  “People who’ve been through that, they seem to think it’s a medal they’ve earned.”

  “It is.”

  She looked at him with interest.

  “A lot of people didn’t survive it,” he said, indifferent to what he was talking about, grateful only for her interest.

  “Oh, the people who killed themselves…”

  “No. What you called the worms. They died on their feet, eaten up with indignities they suffered.”

  “How about three meals a day?”

  “Most of the people in the world don’t eat three—”

  “You sound like Walter. My husband. Three meals a day and people will be good and kind and happy.”

  “It would help.”

  “What thing is it in people that it would help?”

  He stirred restlessly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m ignorant of nearly everything. Not that I don’t read. But I can’t read books about the way things are, history and economics, all that.”

  “What do you like?”

  “Stories.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “Tony, my father, sometimes gave me a book. I lost most of them because of moving around. The last one I read was Passage to India.”

  “Did you like that?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “There was a girl in a class of mine in college. She kept asking all of us, ‘What was going on in those Marabar caves. What was the noise Mrs. Moore heard?’ “ Annie didn’t seem to find that as funny as he did.

  “I wonder…” she said, seriously.

  “What else?”

  “James Huneker.”

  “He didn’t write stories.”

  “He wrote some,” she corrected, without emphasis. “And Conrad. And Chesterton. The Man Who Was Thursday. And Dickens. Robin Hood.”

  “Faulkner?”

  “I don’t like all those idiots. Tony calls him the Mississippi ghoul.”

  “That’s an odd group of people you like.”

  “Oh, well, there are others. I used to make lists of things I liked to read. I loved to write their names down.”

  “And what about modern writers? Like Joyce? Or Virginia Woolf? What about the Russians?”

  “Lawrence,” she said. “Sons and Lovers. Do you remember, when Mr. Morel brings home the packages, and she and Paul—”

  She clutched her belly again. He stood up, alarmed.

  “You are sick.”

  “It’ll go,” she groaned. And then a look of horror came over her face again. Her mouth stretched oddly. He went to her and took one of her hands.

  “Can’t I help you?” he begged.

  “No. I hate to tell you. I hate to say what it is.”

  “I’ll call a doctor.”

  “I have a doctor.” She slid her hand out of his and said, “Sit down. It was nice to talk about stories. It made me feel better.”

  He sat, his knees trembling.

  “Jake was sick too, wasn’t he? Colitis? What happened to Jake?”

  “He wants to go in the army.”

  “Yes. His friend Brody thought that would be a good idea for everybody. The army.”

  He must make an effort to speak plainly. They were adrift in this cellar; their conversation was out of time. Her thinness, the pain that showed on her face, her exhaustion, the tap that dripped, the disarranged bedcovers, the shadowed dampness, the sense of a day blown by the wind into night just outside one small window made him feel as though he was being dissipated into some other medium. The tight knots of certainty and attitudes, opinions, of daily habit, of responsibility to his wife and his child, his political commitment were unloosened.

  “Do you need a job?” he asked abruptly.

  She laughed. “I can get a job, like that,” she said. “There are nothing but jobs at my level of competence. Ten or fifteen a week. The last job was eighteen, really. That’s why I’m sick.” She looked faintly sly for a moment. He was surprised, not thinking she would be sly. “I’ll tell you about it,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean that kind of job.”

  “I was a stock girl when I knew Jake Cranford,” she began, and he could not tell if she was mocking herself with the faint theatrical flourish of her beginning history, or whether she was making an effort to distract herself from the affliction in her belly.

  “I worked in a basement full of rats. One day I could not go down there where the water dripped all day and half the merchandise was growing living mold. I ran out of money on the third day after I was fired. I hocked an engagement ring Walter had given me. I stayed inside for a week, except for going out to buy groceries. I lay in bed and it was a dream in which hours simply went by with no thought, no motion, like a pale sky without clouds or birds, nothing to mark the time. The money was going again. This time there was nothing at the end. Walter wrote me from New York. He said he couldn’t tell me exactly where he was going but if I used my head, I’d remember, and not to expect to hear from him for a while. He sent me a money order for twenty dollars. I cried with relief. I would not have to leave the room yet, except for food. And then that came to an end. On the day I had one dollar left in my bag, a man who wrote me the same time you did, a friend of Walter’s, stopped by. I
was sitting in the room on the bed and there was a knock on the door. I couldn’t see his face for the stack of books he was carrying. He called me Annie as though he’d heard all about me. He set the books down on a chair and I watched them slip off as he spoke. He didn’t pick them up. Neither did I. He was a very small man with a little pointed beard, grayish all over, wearing a smart suit. He said—one of those people who say your name between every word as though reassuring you that they know who you are, leading you to the exact opposite conclusion—that he’d be around to see me soon, give me time to read what he called ‘the literature,’ and that he’d be happy to hear my impressions of what I’d read then. I was to understand that what he’d brought me was only a sampler, but he’d chosen the works carefully in view of my background, my age, my experience. But what I was thinking about—you see, he was the man my husband Walter had spent a whole afternoon with in a cutting room looking at pictures of a South American dancer who’d forgotten to put on her pants. What he was thinking about, I couldn’t guess. I thanked him and he stood at the door a minute, then touched two fingers to his hat like a movie actor and left.”

  “He was a film cutter?” Max asked softly, his curiosity stronger than his wish to not interrupt her.

  “Yes.”

  “Paul Lavan?”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, nodding, no surprise in her voice. Then she looked directly at him. “You were going to a Communist convention that day, weren’t you?”

  Max recalled Fern’s precautions and laughed.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh,” she cried, and clutched herself.

  “Please…what is it?”

  “Tapeworm,” she gasped. “In its death throes.”

  He sat back in the chair, flinging a hand toward her as though to ward off a blow.

  “The doctor gave me something. Malefern. It takes twenty-four hours. I haven’t eaten anything.”

  Max stood up and went to the sink and turned the tap into a tumbler he found there. He drank every bit of the water down. He felt ill.

  “Is there anything—”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I have to wait it out. I want to die. That’s the truth. How can I live through this? It’s thrashing around. God knows how big it is. Do you see? I want to go off a cliff to get away from it, to drown, to be burnt up. Anything.”

  He was so astonished that he stood there like a limp doll, his back against the sink. “I’ll stay,” he muttered. “I’ll stay with you until it’s over.”

  “Will you? Now that you’ve come here, I wouldn’t want to see you go. As long as I was alone, my mind seemed to go. I had to make it go because I can’t stand the thing that is happening. But now, my mind is back. My mind and the worm.”

  “You haven’t slept.”

  “No, I haven’t slept.”

  “Can you have water?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Do you have a telephone?”

  “Upstairs. The woman who owns the house.”

  “Does she know? Could she help you?”

  “She can’t help anyone. She’s mad with trouble. She ran away from her husband a year ago and came west. And her lover took a chain to her two weeks ago in front of the little girl. The little girl ran away. I went and found her. Maybe she would let someone use the phone. Who do you want to phone?” Her voice had risen on her last question. It was like a smothered scream. He shuddered, knowing she didn’t care whom he had to phone.

  “I’m going to stay with you. I have to call my wife.”

  “Will it be all right?”

  “Yes. But I don’t need to phone her yet. Talk. Keep talking.”

  “I will…I read one book that day. It was short. Ten Days That Shook the World. Then I started another, Marching! Marching! by a woman with a strange name, Weathervane?”

  “Weatherwax.”

  “Yes. And the Communist Manifesto and something I’ve already forgotten by Lenin. There, right over there,” and she gestured toward a corner where he saw a pile of books against the wall. “I’d better keep on,” she said. “I get taken up by fear now and then and see myself running down the street, but how can you get away from such a thing? I got another job. Sorting rivets. Three men ran the place. A long narrow room with a roll-top desk in the front and ten bins in the back. There were eight Mexican girls picking through the rivets and a ninth chair empty in front of a bin. They paid nine dollars a week and said when things really got going, they’d pay us piecework wages and we’d make fifty dollars a week.” She lay down.

  “Let me just rest a minute. I’ll talk again in a while.”

  He stayed quiet in the chair, watching her, seeing her white face shining with sweat. She had drawn up her knees, the discolored leather of the huaraches among the blanket folds. A faint trail of light crept along the floor, gray light like the trail of a slug; a ray of street lamp filtered through the little window. He would call Eva. What he had to tell her assumed no reasonable shape.

  The girl lay quietly. She was waiting for the next thrust of the obscene thing in her vitals, for the dread of that moment. She remembered how the Mexican girls had bought her orange Popsicles, laughing as she licked them, standing outside on the sidewalk during their brief lunchtime. Huesos they’d called her, flaca, because she grew thinner daily, as though she were being rendered by the California sunlight. She told Max about that, and he leaned toward her as though he were going deaf. Was she whispering? She didn’t know.

  In the back of the shop, it had been cool and cavelike; the unshaded bulbs hanging over the bins had thrown an orange cast on her hands. They sat sorting rivets, dropping the damaged ones into baskets at their feet. The Mexican girls brought their lunches in tin pails, cold omelets, beans, tacos. Annie bought a hot dog now and then from a wagon at the corner and drank Cokes. She sometimes didn’t eat, buying cigarettes instead. On an empty stomach, the smoke made her lightheaded; her chair seemed to rest not on a dirty floor but on a moving tide, and her hands trembled. She felt off balance, on the verge of illness. She discovered she could arouse a reckless hilarity in the girls. She was their clown. Sometimes the three men drove out to Lockheed-Vega aircraft plant to pick up sacks of unsorted rivets and deliver the sorted ones. The Mexican girls often walked during their lunchtime, their arms encircling each other’s waists, looking like a flock of plump brown birds.

  Bent over her bin all day, Annie labored toward six o’clock while in the front room, on the roll-top desk, the men played craps. They threw the dice back and forth, swearing at each other, the smell of cigar smoke drifting back to the bins. Annie stooped beneath the day’s torpor.

  “Those Jews!” said Laurita.

  “Annie, chica, ask them when they’re gonna pay us by the sack. They’ll listen to you,” said Natalie.

  She tried.

  “That’s all right, kid,” one of the men said. “Soon as we get straight with the airplane people, get all this worked out, get the contract, you fellows will go on straight piecework. Takes time—you get me? We got practically not two bucks between us. Understand, we’re trying to get this thing set up for all of us, but we got to pull in our belts until the good times come. When they start making planes for the war, you’ll see. You got to remember, we’re not one of your rich outfits with plenty of capital.” She went back to her bin and listened to the dice hitting the wood. Suddenly she’d shouted, “When are you going to pay us enough to live on? Don’t give me any story about contracts!”

  The three men came to the door, their heads all held at the same angle of indignation.

  “Out,” said one to Annie. “You’re just out.”

  She began to laugh. “Crooks,” she screamed. Around her the girls were silent. She glanced at them. They had drawn back their chairs. Their eyes glistened. She could hear their accelerated breathing.

  “I’ve been fired,” she said gaily, weakly.

  Laurita stood up, then the others.

  “We’ll all go,” said the girl. There were distres
sed murmurs from the others. They needed the money; they couldn’t quit.

  “I’ll go,” Annie said, pulling back her chair. “But you don’t have to. Thanks anyhow.”

  She wasn’t angry any more. After she left, there would be no sign she’d ever been in that room. There was nothing to take from it except her old black pocketbook. As she walked toward the front where the three men were standing in a line like an ushering service, one of them stuffed a five-dollar bill in her hand, unclenching her fingers and closing them around the money.

  “I’m going to the union,” Annie said softly.

  “Ha! The union,” said the one who’d given her the money.

  “What does she know,” said another. “The stupid!”

  Max was standing over her looking down.

  “You’re all right?”

  “I was remembering that place,” she said. She sat up slowly, as though afraid she’d empty out.

  “This will be over,” Max said. She looked up at him. They remained that way for what seemed a long time, simply looking at each other. Then he went back and sat down.

  “I went to the union about them,” she said. She had hardly known what a union was. John Lewis, the CIO, that was all. She discovered the central office in the phone book.

  The CIO headquarters were housed in an old frame building with dusty floors. A man was sweeping up some debris. She was directed to an office where a man wearing a gray fedora sat behind a scored oak desk. There was nothing on it except a telephone and an ashtray. Sunlight knifed through a torn shade and left a scar upon the floor.

  “I’ve just been fired from this place,” she had said.

  “Hold it. What’s your job?”

  “I was sorting rivets.”

  “That’s not a category.”

  “The men who own the shop hired nine girls. They collect rivets from the airplane factories, then sort them according to size, and the ones that aren’t damaged they sell back.”

  “What rivets?”

  “The ones they use in airplanes. When they’re riveting, the rivets fly all around. They lose a good many.”