by Alice Adams
They had an inquest. Jasper was acquitted. An accident.
Miriam thought it was an accident too; she couldn’t really blame Jasper. Still, she had wondered how it would have been if it had been Thomas with the gun, blowing off the head of Jasper, a white person.
(Eliza wondered too.)
What was most devastating to Eliza was Miriam’s acceptance; this was the sort of thing that could happen, any time. At any moment the friend you love could get blown up right in front of you.
Miriam even seemed anxious not to make too much of it. “I felt real bad for a long time after that,” she said. “I don’t know—”
“Christ, Miriam, of course you did.”
Miriam never referred to this story again, nor to Thomas, and neither, of course, did Eliza.
And so, when left alone, when not complaining or sighing over Kathleen, Eliza and Miriam generally talked about clothes.
“I was to the Emporium last night,” said Miriam, “and there was these make-believe fur coats?” Miriam’s observations often came in the form of questions, as though she doubted the evidence of her senses. “Oooh, they was pretty, I’m telling you. Real pretty.”
“Miriam, you’d be paying for one of those coats for a year. And long after you got tired of it. You buy too much stuff.” Of course this was true, Eliza had said it before, and it would never take effect. “Why don’t you make a list of what you need for a year?” she asked once more, wearily.
“You right, I reckon I should.”
Outside, in the high noon heat, the slightest breeze had arisen, barely enough to rattle the stiff yellow leaves that had fallen in the gutters. On the other side of San Francisco, along Grant Avenue, preparations were being made for the Chinese New Year. That night there would be a parade, and the sounds of Chinese flutes and mandolins, firecrackers and human shouts would all be audible as far away as Russian Hill, where Eliza’s cottage was. Where, some blocks away, Dr. Branner occupied the penthouse of an expensive new apartment building.
“I’d really like to go on home,” Eliza said. “You don’t think Kathleen will call?”
“Naw, you go on. She call, I tell her something.”
Eliza grinned. “You’re great. Well, have a good weekend. Happy Chinese New Year.”
“Yeah. You, too.”
Eliza started down the hall. As she turned the corner toward the bank of elevators, Dr. Branner—Gilbert Branner—was emerging from his office, as she almost knew he would be. He had bent down to lock his door.
Eliza said, “Oh, hi!” And she achieved with her voice and her stance a remarkable transformation: as he straightened to look at her, he saw suddenly that she was not an office worker (and no one would be more aware of that than Gilbert Branner) but an attractive young blond woman, of a certain education (Eastern), a certain social style.
“Hi, how are you?” he asked, smiling at her, and achieving at least for himself a vigorous sound of youth. “Hot enough for you?”
“Unbelievable!”
The elevator was there, and together they entered and descended, smiling at each other in a companionable and pleased way. Eliza said, “You wouldn’t be driving over to Russian Hill now, would you?”
“Well, yes, is that where you live, too? I didn’t know—what luck!”
“Yes, marvelous,” she agreed.
They walked out toward his open car, with their separate but momentarily coincident plans, into the unnatural, sweltering afternoon.
6 / Phone Calls
and Firecrackers
By the following Sunday the heat had not abated, nor had the Chinese New Year celebrations appreciably calmed down; to Eliza, alone in her Russian Hill cottage, both the weather and the festive sounds seemed exotic and unreal. And she herself had a curious feeling of suspension, of aimless waiting and undefined need.
Catherine had gone across town for lunch and a movie with her best friend, and Eliza had a free day, with which, uncharacteristically, she could not decide what to do. And it was as though her vague needs were transmitted into the air as messages—and received by various friends, who telephoned.
First Kathleen, in her staccato, nonstop way: “That fucking Lawry, do you know he never showed up on Friday? He calls me in the middle of the night, really stoned. All I needed. Doesn’t want to come up or anything, and God forbid we should screw; he just wants to talk. I hung up on him, and then I went out to a bar, you know, the old body-shop routine, but I really couldn’t take it. It made me sick, and so I went on home. Jesus, men. I may give the whole thing up and get a dildo. Well, how are you? What’s that crazy noise at your house?”
“Firecrackers. Chinese New Year.”
“Oh, really? And then he called me this morning, like we were friends, asking when he gets to meet my secretary. Not you, Mrs. Quarles, Miriam. That rotten bastard got a look at her one time—he’d come by the office to see me and she was strutting across the street, high, probably—and ever since he’s been pestering me, teasing me about her. Shit, I think I will introduce them, they deserve each other. Well, see you tomorrow.”
Hanging up, Eliza recognized that the conversation had made her extremely uneasy. Although Kathleen’s anger was never directed at her, still Eliza felt and was vaguely frightened by its force; its hostile weight battered against her. And she truly hated Kathleen’s rage at Miriam. Sometimes Eliza felt so protective of Miriam that she had considered adopting her, and then had thought, Do I really need an eighteen-year-old black daughter?
To combat her unease, she created some minor chores for herself.
She went into the kitchen, where she got out the blender and a bowl of leftover vegetables for soup, a thrifty habit she had learned early from Josephine—to whom frugality was a virtue, if haute cuisine was not.
What Eliza really wanted to be doing was any one of three other things: waxing a newly stripped walnut coffee table, walking in the marvelous light air outside or working on a poem. But perhaps she did not want to do any of those strongly enough? she was truly suspended between wants? As she saw it just then, those were treats to be saved for later on. In the meantime, having ground the vegetables and added chicken soup, she cleaned the blender and turned her attention to the inside of the stove.
She decided that when the phone rang next she would not answer it, knowing quite well what was coming: an inevitable and unpleasant call from Gilbert Branner, of whom she had managed not to think.
The previous Friday afternoon had been entirely terrible for him: a humiliation. For her it was sad and embarrassing. And unpleasant: unable to perform, he had commanded help from her, and she complied, despite distaste (and was that why her help hadn’t worked?), despite annoyance at her own compliant, female nature. She ended more annoyed at herself than at him. And afterward she even thought that she would have to see him again, when he asked, as he surely would, just for the sake of his aging and vulnerable ego. But then she thought, No, I’ve done too much of that, too much yielding and pretending, and it’s too expensive for me. Why should I see him again, when I don’t want to at all, and when he can easily find someone who likes and values him more than I do?
She went upstairs with a vague plan about going through old winter clothes, then reminded herself that winter was only in abeyance, that the insane heat was not a sign of spring. Yet it was with a sort of springtime dreaming lethargy that she fell across her bed, looking out the window at the small garden below in which some of the shrubbery had been deceived into a sudden flowering.
By the time the phone rang, she had forgotten not to answer it.
Gilbert Branner said, “Well, what luck to find you at home on such an exceptionally beautiful Sunday.”
She murmured something, and trusted that her sound was polite.
“I was hoping I could persuade you to come out for a little while on my boat. It’s a perfect day for the Bay.”
Not if it has berths, it occurred to Eliza to say. Instead she said, “That’s terribly nice, but I p
romised my daughter a walk through Chinatown. New Year’s is still going on.”
At that he chuckled. “Say, do you want to hear a good one?” And he told her a joke about Chinese girls that was racist, sexist, unfunny but mercifully short.
“Well,” he said, and he had begun to sound a little awkward; were her unsaid thoughts traversing the few blocks’ distance between them? He attempted a little laugh. “I do think we should have a rerun sometime. A new start?”
She murmured something negative, aware of rising tension—a tightening in her throat.
He said, “Of course it’s entirely up to you, but I do think you’re being a little unjust, if I may say so.” His tone had hardened and grown colder as he spoke, so that the last phrase was pure ice.
“It’s not just that—” It’s not your sexual performance, or lack of it; it’s everything about you, she would have liked to say. I thought you’d be fun for an afternoon. My mistake, not yours. But I really don’t like you at all, any more than—probably—you like most of the girls you screw.
None of which she was able to say to Gilbert Branner. Instead she said, “I’m really sorry.”
“You know, I ordinarily don’t spend much time with secretaries.” Was that his notion of the coup de grâce?
“So I understand.” Eliza was unable not to say this.
An iced pause. And then the real coup de grače: “Well, you actually won’t fall into that category much longer. The grant that supports your job runs out next month. The other two—uh—ladies will stay on, of course.”
Was that true? Could she now be free of jobs, collecting unemployment money? As she hung up, Eliza was breathless with the possibility.
And having said that she was going to walk through Chinatown, that was what she did, in the heat, in the bedraggled remnants of the New Year celebration.
She walked down Vallejo Street to Columbus, and then right, toward Broadway; hurried across to Grant Avenue, to Chinatown. There the old ladies, clutching tattered shopping bags, walked sideways on their ruined feet past the cheap bright Western-style stores and the Chinese markets that displayed exotic vegetables and fish and barbecued chickens and duck. Thin dark young Oriental men, dressed in black business suits for the holiday, sauntered along the street, and almond-eyed children darted in and out of alleys, while firecrackers spurted like machine guns. The gutters were littered with sodden bright confetti.
Back in her own house, an hour or so later, Eliza was tired, but some of the day’s earlier trouble had drained or evaporated from her mind. With a cup of tea she sat comfortably at her kitchen table, savoring the rare luxury of no thoughts at all.
And then the phone rang. And because it could be Catherine saying something about when she was coming home—saying anything—for the third time that day Eliza answered the ring.
It was a friend from college, Peggy Kennerlie, inviting her to a party in Belvedere, some weeks off. Eliza accepted, out of habit, and then wondered why: she was tired of both the Kennerlies; she had been tired of Kennerlie parties for years. Maybe she wouldn’t go.
She began to see this series of calls as some form of punishment—or possibly a test?
Another call. An unmistakable soft voice said, “Hey, Eliza, this is Miriam. How’re you doing?”
“Oh, I’m fine. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, real okay.” She laughed, her rich rounded laughter that meant affection for Eliza, and that also signaled that she was high, on God knows what. “Say, Eliza, do you know the last name of Lawry? Kathleen’s Lawry?”
“Lawry? No, I don’t.”
“Well, it’s got to be the one. He call me, say he seen me, say could I meet him for a drink.”
“Christ, Miriam. Kathleen would kill you.”
“You right, and anyway I’m not about to meet him for a drink. I don’t drink!” And she laughed again, prolonged, and high.
• • •
Eliza’s last phone call was from Daria, calling from New York, to say that she was pregnant. “Two months, a baby next August—it could come on your birthday! Eliza, isn’t that fantastic! I can’t believe it. I’ve always wanted—we’d like a dozen children, Smith and I. Eliza, isn’t it great?”
7 / Miriam
Tall and beautiful, stoop-shouldered, Miriam shuffled across the hard bare neglected yard of the Project, in the morning, on her way to work. She was wearing tight new black shoes and a big brown coat. Even though the coat hid most of her body, she still stooped—she always had; and she walked with her head lowered, through the bunches of skinny little kids on their way to school, with their books and funny little bags of lunch.
She was hungry; quarreling at breakfast with her mother, her stomach had closed up and she couldn’t eat. Her mother was light-skinned and had dyed her hair blond, and she was mean. Her mother said Miriam was mean: “The blacker the meaner. You just like your father, just exactly. Sulking. Black and mean.” Maybe she was mean, but just because she got a raise at work was she supposed to make payments on her mother’s living-room sofa from the Emporium? Even if some of the stains were from Cokes and things that she and her friends had spilled when they got high?
She wanted a Coke now, but she was late, and it was faster to walk than take a bus to the hospital, the office. Where Kathleen might or might not be mad.
Quarreling with her mother, in those small crowded rooms, with her brothers and sisters watching, filled Miriam with need. She needed to scream and hit and cry, and she wildly wanted everything in the world that was not her mother, not the Project. She wanted more shoes and outfits, and velvet sofas and tall gold lamps with pleated shades, and big white refrigerators full of food, and fast white cars—things like you could win in a contest. Like the Christmas windows at Macy’s or Sears. All that wanting sometimes made her sick.
Along Fillmore Street, where she walked, among the small greasy restaurants that had barbecue and hamburgers and Mexican food, there were a lot of new little stores that sold funny things: old dresses with yellow lace on them, and old-timey men’s suits with big shoulders and big white buttons. Who’d want that stuff? But some of the stores sold real nice things, some nice new outfits, in these bad colors. But it all cost money.
She stopped to look at some purple velvet pants with a tunic top, wondering, Would I look good in that? Look long and thin? There was always layaway. In front of the outfit, reflected in the glass, she saw her own face, big and black, with kinky hair that she hadn’t had time to iron out that morning.
Then, making her jump and turn around quickly, a man’s voice said, “You’re a girl that likes nice things.”
She turned toward him, and he had to be a pimp, in those sharp tight clothes: wine suede bell-bottoms and a black silk turtleneck stretched tight across his chest. But he looked nice, too; he looked good.
“Some, not too much,” she said, and she lifted her head and started to walk on up the street.
Being tall, he kept up with her—no trouble for him. “You look good,” he said. “I really dig the way you look.”
“Lucky you.” She walked faster, because it had crazily come to her that what she wanted to say was: Okay, then, why don’t you pay me for looking good? You think it happens free?
“You work?” he asked.
“Yeah.” Her sigh said what she thought of her job: the details that made no sense and that turned into mistakes, the boredom, Kathleen, who was always talking and mad, and her low, low pay.
“Maybe you in the wrong line.” He laughed.
A pimp. They all came on the same. She knew. She said, “Maybe you in the wrong line of work.”
He laughed again. “You think you know? You ever think to be a model? Get money just to wear nice clothes?”
Knowing better, still her heart raced. Had she ever thought? Just all the time. Herself in long white fur coats, with shoes that matched, and cameras all turned on her. Ten, fifteen dollars an hour. Could he be not a pimp? “I’m late for work,” she said.
&nbs
p; “You come back this way? When you get off? I’ll be looking for you after five. I might have a little Valentine for you.” He touched her arm, so that she stopped, and she looked at him again. He was blacker than she was, with eyes that slanted up, and a sharp little beard on his chin. “Well, so long,” he said, and he made a sort of salute to her with a casual, loosely clasped-up fist. “I’ll see you, baby,” and he laughed.
She scowled, not knowing what to make of him, what to do, and she turned away with her chin up. Let him find her again if he could.
“Miriam, you’re late!” Kathleen screamed out, in the office.
But Miriam, who listened for tone more than words, knew that Kathleen was mad because she had something to tell.
Miriam changed into a lab coat, which hid her almost as well, and she said, “You hear from Lawry?”
Not at all intuitive herself, Kathleen was always amazed by Miriam. “You Geminis,” she said. “I think maybe he’s coming up this weekend. I got another see-you-soon card.”
“I reckon he could be coming.”
“God, the crumbs I live on! And after that last no-show trip. I know I should dump him.”
Kathleen had this idea that she, Miriam, understood everything she said, but Miriam did not; nothing about Kathleen made any sense to Miriam. There she was, white and over twenty, been to college, making good money being a supervisor, but she never bought any clothes, just paid rent and spent money on her little car, and all hung up on this guy who had no money and moved to Los Angeles and only came up every four or five weeks to see her, and then half the time didn’t show.
Even Eliza made more sense to Miriam than Kathleen did; she missed Eliza, and didn’t understand about her getting fired. “I made him fire me so I could get unemployment,” Eliza had explained, seeming happy about the whole thing. Kathleen did not miss Eliza, and said mean things about her all the time.