The Wintering

by Joan Williams

  “See you around,” Tony said. “I’m going out to the Island a couple of days. I’ll drop by your place when I get back.”

  Amy yearned not to leave and toward many things for which she had no names. Even today, she could not think what to do, yet Tony was going away with friends. How had he made them? The details of life were myriad when they were too complex to be dealt with. Besieged by doubts, she went to the door and opened it, then closed it after a lingering glance at Tony’s expressionless face.

  Her heels gave back hollow raps on the hall floor. The bannister she held to was grimy. Opaque with dirt, the glass panels of the front door reflected nothing as she approached them. Though stepping out onto the stoop, Amy felt she must have a more womanly and a more worldly look. Certainly, her round-necked and flower-sprigged dress was too prim, too reminiscent of home, too childish, and another instinct had been sharpened. Before opening her purse and looking inside, she knew her money was going to be missing.

  With unsurprised eyes, Amy stared at the pocket of the wallet, missing fifty dollars. Her first inclination was to avoid the incident and once she would have followed it. The money was not the bother so much, for she was always sorry Tony had so little. But fearing confronting him with the theft, she would make herself do it. Going back upstairs, she was willful and shaking. Her voice was a little steely, to be kept free of wavering. She knocked and walked in almost immediately.

  Though Tony had not moved, he had not been expecting her. The knife tip, about to be inserted into the jar, remained touching the glass rim, landing there with a slight ring. His elbows only dropped slightly toward his sides. He looked secured to the windowsill and hopeless about his situation. The apartment’s interior then leapt, at once, to her mind’s eye. Amy accused him of taking her money, and Tony’s voice denying it was tired but not at all angry.

  Politely and evenly, Amy had said, “I know you took money from me. You think I don’t need it, but I do. Please, give it back.”

  He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t take any money from you.”

  “I know you did, Tony.”

  “You must have dropped it when we were out.”

  “I didn’t. It doesn’t matter, keep it. I just wanted you to know I knew you took it.”

  “I didn’t take any money from you,” he said.

  “Have it your way.” She closed the door.

  Then when she emerged again onto the street, the day was ecstatically fine. Smells everywhere along the street were delicious. At a candy store the doors stood open, and from an Italian restaurant warm rich food smells floated along the street. Even a shoeshine rag, flipped outward upon the air by a boy as she passed, had a tar, pine scent, mindful of trees. While considering whether she felt cheap, Amy thought that the setting for her experience had been perfect. Again, she saw the mattress, bread-thin on the floor, and all the interior of the cold-water apartment.

  Before now, she had been cowered by girls who dressed appropriately for the Village, by those who worked in its shops, selling handmade leather accessories and silver jewelry. The latter, geometrically shaped, displayed on invisibly thin wire, hung from the ceilings of rooms, like stars. Today, with no hesitation, Amy bought a leather purse and thong-tied flat sandals, though her arches ached when she tried them on. She selected tight jersey blouses in brilliant but oddly matched colors. Paying by check, she further forgave Tony, for to be in rebellion was expensive, and how did people manage who had no families to give them money? She was bothered about not having a job, even if that were a middle-class idea as Tony had said. She lingered before windows where Help Wanted signs were pasted. Eventually, she was depressed by the sight of her pale feet in the sloppy sandals, her toes dirty from soot. The leather pocketbook was deep as a horse’s feedbag and difficult to fill up, though she put in unused cosmetics from the dime store and a bulky amount of Kleenex. Writers ought to be able, on the spot, to jot down observations, she thought, and added a notebook. Her first entry read:

  Today, I saw an old woman tottering down the street with blackened eyes. A child wearing a birthday hat came by me, in a car, and tossed confetti, which fell over my hair.

  Reading the entry later, Amy could not discern the importance of these events in their lives, as well as in her own. She had nothing to add, after reporting what she saw and filled up moments of unrewarding thought by doodling on the notebook margins.

  Another early admonition of Edith’s had been never to run after boys. Perhaps that was a middle-class idea, too, but Amy would wait for Tony to get in touch with her. Alone in her apartment, she memorized poetry, to hear a voice aloud in the room and to use hers. Nancy, soon to be married, had moved back to her parents’ apartment. Considering buying a canary, Amy knew she would never want to clean the cage. She hated herself for clucking at her goldfish, as if they were babies, hated that she talked to them in a voice people used for responsive puppies. Her days grew longer and emptier. Thinking of ways she might have experiences, she jotted down in her notebook several headings:

  Liquor

  Drugs

  Men

  An affair with a Negro

  But what point was there to getting drunk in her apartment by herself? She would not go to a bar alone, nor would she smoke marijuana. She was looking for reality and not trying to escape it, she felt. On the other hand, if she had wanted marijuana, she would not have known how to get it, which was the disappointing point. At a loss, she wondered how to meet Negroes. The ones she encountered here did not seem interested in girls, though how, she wondered, did you meet even them?

  One day, wandering, she saw a Room for Rent sign in a window and decided to move. The room was appropriate in that it was too awful for anyone from Delton to see. However, she did miss going out with well-dressed and well-mannered young men, who had money. Quill and Leigh and Billy Walter. She had envisioned their coming often to New York to take her out and, of course, they never had. When she moved, the gloom in her new hallway was almost tangible. In drifts, it came down the unpolished stairs, yellowed by the stained-glass window half-illuminating the landing, and rose in puffs off the dusty carpet, disappeared into faded brown stripes of the wallpaper, renewed itself to fill a bowl for mail, which the tenants left full of bills and other unwanted pieces.

  Her landlord was tousled and lame and wore a bitter expression, even accepting fifteen dollars, in advance, for her first week’s rent. Sensing her pity, he saw also that Amy was lonesome and feared her wanting to talk. She went up to her room, feeling his rejection in the firmness with which he closed his door. Finding the bed sheets unchanged from the last tenant, Amy could not face the landlord again, nor did she have the inclination to ask for favors. It showed fortitude to crawl in between those sheets; arms along her sides, she lay stiffly, unwittingly thinking the position would ward off bedbugs or diseases. Small and rectangular, the room’s yellow walls had faded to a nondescript color. Many sleepless nights, Amy thought about the procession of previous occupants, who might have lain wide-eyed, too. She was no different from any of them. Here, she would be replaced as she had been in her English tutorial. Her college professor, now, probably barely remembered Amy Howard when she had been one of his favorites.

  Moving in, Amy had looked into the closet and beneath the bed and searched the dresser drawers, but nothing had been left behind by the room’s previous tenant. The same sense of vacancy and lack of personality would remain when she was gone. At home, around her dressing table, she had tacked up pictures of friends and favors from parties. Her mother, or even the cleaning lady, looking in there would think of her, Amy felt.

  She dreamed, often now, of leaves rattling and falling and saying they were dying, which was followed by images of snow. Before she could realize them fully, it would be April and spring again, though as quickly, the leaves would be rattling and falling and saying they were dying. Hurry! Hurry! Amy, they cried. To her disgust, she hung back fearfully even in dream, not knowing
in which direction she ought to go. Again, she slept late and woke to see in a loft, opposite, women bent over long tables sewing. Guilty at being in bed, she quickly drew down the shade. How did those women reconcile themselves to life in a loft hardly lit, or to their repetitive work? Lost, she nevertheless believed her life on some better track.

  Finally, when she came in, the sheets had been changed. Unmistakably, her pillow case had been used to sop up tears, and had someone noticed? Would the person who changed the sheets have looked into her drawers? She thought they had the appearance of a dryer with clothes tumbled to a stop. Had that person wondered why a young girl would choose this room when obviously she could afford better, if they had noted her clothes in the closet and her luggage beneath the bed? Were her sleekly cased typewriter, or the stack of classical novels on the window ledge any clue to her personality, or to normalcy? Obviously, she was not holed up here to read lewd magazines, for instance.

  Would the unknown visitor be astute enough to observe hesitation between two worlds? One coat hook held carefully shrunken blue jeans, with an untracked zipper, while another held a dress with a designer’s satin label. On the dusty dresser top was a bottle of expensive perfume, next to a ream of cheap canary yellow typing paper. The whole room seemed in a quandary; even the floor slanted. Able to solve only one problem, Amy took the jeans to a tailoring shop across the street.

  She had a more ladylike look than the Greek tailor was used to, and as soon as she entered the shop, Amy won him. She spoke politely, or he would not have agreed to fix merely the zipper on a pair of limp blue jeans. Having time, Amy asked questions about him and his country; in common, they desired a warmer climate and a less crowded place than New York. Though he had an abundance of ash-colored hair, and his stomach paunch required him to sit some distance from his machine, the tailor forgot them because of Amy’s interest. He asked if she would go with him to a Greek café. Would she like to see belly dancers?

  She could have overlooked his being fat and toad-ugly, but it was annoying somehow that he forgot them. And she imagined, rightly, that in the Bronx where he had mentioned living, there was a sunless apartment full of antimacassars crocheted by a plump grey-haired wife. Amy refused his invitation. Miles lay ahead across the shop before she rang the bell, exiting, which she had rung coming in. The tailor bent with a rejected air to his machine, setting in motion its almost continously turning small wheel. Not to hurt him more, Amy had said that she was a graduate student with no time to spare from her dissertation. Since he was watching, she had to return to her room. The lame landlord’s door was always shut, television an unending murmur behind it. Climbing toward her room in the yellowed gloom, Amy began to wonder what good all this silence, and this aloneness, were doing her.

  The stairs groaned bending inward. Other roomers went off daily to work. Possibly, it had been the landlord’s mother, trying to help the place, who had tacked net curtains over glass panels in the front door. Now, the worn and separating threads were like a spider’s web. Shutting her own door, Amy leaned against it in tears, thinking of a young girl who spoke poetry aloud to hear her own voice and talked to goldfish, whose response was to swim soundlessly through a glass castle. If she telephoned someone was that asking directly for help? The strongest people, athletes even, had limits to their endurance, Amy told herself. The need to break the monotony of herself did not mean weakness, did it? Frankly, she wanted to see someone from her own background. Apprehension grew during a long wait. Faintly up and down protective corridors, young men called to one another. Eventually, footsteps stopped by the phone receiver, which she had imagined as dangling. Her voice was weak at first. Then it grew stronger, though evidently not strong enough. For on the other end, Leigh said in exasperation and repeatedly, Hello. Hello. Hello.

  “It’s me. Guess who.”

  “Why, Amy,” he said, his voice descending.

  “I’m in New York looking for a job. Are you surprised?”

  “No. I’m more surprised you stayed at home so long. You didn’t seem to fit in there. Are you having trouble finding a job? How about your friend, Almoner. I thought he’d give you a leg-up in publishing. What’s going on there?”

  “Here? Absolutely nothing. You may have heard static in the phone.”

  “Not there, stupid. With Almoner.”

  “Oh, nothing. We don’t even write any more.”

  “Just as well. I never believed that was as innocent as you pretended. I watched him look at you. Surely though, he’d help you get a job.”

  “I don’t want to use him.”

  “Why not? Everybody uses everybody.”

  “Do I have to be like everybody else?” she questioned.

  “Suit yourself. Look, I have to run.”

  “Oh. A minute. I was thinking about brandy Alexanders, how many we used to drink. Even before dinner! It’s sickening to think about now. But, I just feel like doing something again. Can you ever come down from New Haven, for lunch even?”

  The pause while Leigh thought of an excuse was obvious. “I have a paper due soon. Then I’m heading up to Canada for a vacation. Maybe in the fall.”

  She hung on, saying anything that came to mind. “Remember Quill? That boy who went to Princeton and was so fat but got thin? My mother wrote he and his wife are having a baby.”

  “That’s the most interesting news I’ve heard recently.”

  “Of course, it’s not interesting to you. But it surprised me so. I don’t feel old enough to have a baby. I don’t know anything myself.”

  “Listen, girlie. I’ve really got to run.”

  When a bell rang distantly, Amy thought of making some snide remark about an ivory tower. “Run then,” she said only.

  Tony swung around his newel post like a child about a pole, one arm and leg extended wide. As if on alert, his freckles appeared when he grinned. He seemed not surprised to see Amy, standing in the entranceway.

  “I was just passing by.”

  “I came by your place once,” he said. “You had moved.”

  “Oh.” She could not hide looking pleased. “No one told you where I had gone?”

  “No one knew you. Some people thought they remembered a blond girl, moving.”

  “I gave the super five dollars. It looks like he could have remembered after that!” She ended on a wail.

  “I thought maybe you’d gone back to Kansas City.”

  “Delton,” Amy said firmly. “I’ve never laid eyes on Kansas City and never hope to.”

  Tony’s look indicated he thought all such places were the same. However, he saw the difference in her and whistled appreciatively. “So, look at you. You look almost as if you belong here, not fresh off the ooold plantation.”

  Amy squashed down a thought, that to look like everybody one place was the same as looking like everybody someplace else. She only thanked Tony for his approval. Her arches in the flat sandals ached even during the time of his appraisal. She was slightly breathless, the faddish wide leather belt tight at her waist.

  “Were you on your way somewhere?”

  “Just out,” Tony said.

  “Oh.”

  “Why, you want someplace to go?”

  “It doesn’t make any difference to me.”

  “I’ve got an idea you’d like. Want to go to the lesbian bar around the corner? That’ll be a new experience for you. I want to see a girl there, who’ll help me get a show.”

  “Tony, great!”

  “You want to go?”

  “If it’s all right.”

  “It’s all right. Damn, though, my blankety sister didn’t get off her duff and send me any money this month.”

  Amy was silent.

  Tony said, glancing sidewise, “Well, it’s an experience. Maybe some other time.”

  She took the bait knowingly. “I have enough for a few beers.”

  She wondered, ushered by Tony to the street, why he expected his sister to send him money. Married to a fireman, she wheedl
ed five dollars now and then from her grocery budget, Tony had said. There was a difference, but she accepted money, and so Amy was silent.

  Hesitating at the top of steep stairs leading from the street, she peered down toward the bar, as dank and damp as the basement the room once had been. Sawdust on the floor, wet from spilled drinks, never dried. The little damp sprinkles clung messily and uncomfortably inside her sandals. How she hated the shoes. Going along the street with Tony, she had noticed the duet they made, her slapping heels having the same insolent lazy sound as his. As a cigarette machine loomed ahead, she paused just before Tony asked if she had any change. She pinched it from her coin purse reluctantly.

  She was ashamed and remonstrated with herself about being stingy, crossing to the self-service bar with Tony. If he turned out to be a famous artist, then how small she would feel. Still, she was haunted by conventions and her past would not let go. She was embarrassed paying the bartender. He paid her no attention; she might have been faceless, a voice asking for two beers. Undoubtedly Irish, with thick eyebrows and a ruddy complexion, he had a fatherly air. He seemed a judge, too, looking down from a platform where the bar was built. Saying, “Two beers,” he set them down with authority.

  Why try, her mute eyes straining, to signal she did not belong in this subterranean world any more than he? Her money lay, as if trying to survive, in foamy puddles left by the two overflowed beers. Each carrying one, she and Tony searched for a table.

  They were hailed by Anila, a dark heavy girl with a slight accent, who gave Amy a hard handshake, introduced. She then talked animatedly to Tony about his show. Amy noticed how she stared around the room, and having some qualms, she drank her beer and was silent. Though girls danced together, few appeared any different from her, to Amy’s surprise.