Mon., January 29, 1906. Went up to Aunt Sally’s in eve and hashed over reception list. Cut it down to two hundred and ninety.
Sat., February 10, 1906. Went to oculist in P.M. Got to have stronger glasses. Telegram from Chester saying Mr. Atkinson says April 3 OK.
Tues., February 13, 1906. Rained hard. Sick. First time on date exactly for years. Wonder if I’ll squeeze thro’ April 3. Seven weeks from tonight.
Wed., February 21, 1906. Went to club to hear Griggs lecture on Tolstoy. Small crowd as it poured hard all eve. Lecture good—sat with Isabel and Sam. Quit work forever, I hope.
Sat., February 24, 1906. Fine warm day. Sewed all day with Jane and came back to Lexington in eve. Chester’s father home from Europe. Brought me drawers, chemise, stockings, gloves, and picture.
(Lucy now had the diary Pop’s father had kept during the trip. Once at Ma and Pop’s house I had curled up on the old sofa and read it.)
Thurs., March 15, 1906. Priscilla had euchre party in P.M. for me. Thirty-six there. Fine time. Snowed hard all day. Regular blizzard. Went to bed at eight thirty.
Tues., March 20, 1906. Chester came on three o’clock train. I went down to his house to supper. He seems just the same. Oh, I’m so glad he’s come.
Thurs., March 22, 1906. Aunt Sally had ten girls to lunch for me—Jessie, Betty, Priscilla, Ellen, Jane, Isabel, Babs, Kitty, Nell & Florence. All went to tea at four at Mrs. Stewart’s to meet Miss Townsend. Chester up in eve.
Tues., March 27, 1906. Chester and I went to Boston and bot our rings at Stowell’s.
Wed., March 28, 1906. Luncheon and cards at Mrs. Bates’. Took first prize at euchre. Euchre party for me at Jessie’s in eve. Twenty-eight there.
Thurs., March 29, 1906. Tried on wedding gown in A.M. All finished. Concord in P.M. with Chester. Party for us at Staffords’ in eve. Played hearts.
Mon., April 2, 1906. Packed. In P.M. went down to Priscilla’s to supper. Jessie and Florence there. We four went to ride around State Road by moonlight. Then rehearsal at church. Perfect evening. I do hope tomorrow will be like it.
Tues., April 3, 1906. My wedding day! Elegant day, warm & clear. Married in Lexington Unitarian Church by Mr. Reed at eight P.M. Went to Boston to Lenox Hotel and spent night.
I stopped the car beside the pond and looked at the ducks and swans. David and I had got married in April, too, during the April vacation of our sophomore year at Brompton. We were married at home in Saundersborough, in the living room, by a lawyer who was a justice of the peace and who was also a friend of Lucy’s. Lucy was there, and Susan, and David’s folks, and Ma and Pop had come up on a bus because they didn’t like to drive anymore.
After the quick ceremony, after the drinks and canapés and kisses, David and I had left and driven to the ocean to spend three nights, which was all we could afford without dipping too deeply into wedding-present money that must be saved for tuition and the mysterious expenses being married would bring, like electricity and fuel. This cabin colony was new then. Which cabin had it been? There was a small living-room-and-kitchen, with a window overlooking rocks and sea, and at the general store down the road we’d bought supplies, bacon and eggs and hamburg and beer, officially a married couple at last, going shopping, and I cooked our first meal in our own place in that kitchen. When we weren’t in bed we walked along the rocks or went for drives, and we visited the cottage, closed for the winter.
Then the last afternoon I did a wash and hung it out on the little clothesline. David’s honeymoon-new white wool socks weren’t dry by evening, so I laid them across the grating of the gas floor furnace, and we went to bed.
We woke together. He said, “There’s something wrong,” and the blackness was choked thick with gray, but I was sleepy and slow, I didn’t understand, and then he said, “Jesus H. Christ, the place is on fire,” and he dived across me, yanked me out of bed, threw my bathrobe at me, and pulled on his pants.
In the living room we found it was just smoke, the cabin filled with smoke from the charred black socks on the register.
David managed to pry them off while I opened windows, and we began to laugh. Yet later, with the years, the memory became much more frightening than the moment had been. We could have suffocated. It could have ended then, if we hadn’t awakened in time.
The night before the night before Christmas, and here I was at Dot’s, drinking beer and smoking one of her cigarettes. Although the track at the park was covered with snow now and Warren and I no longer went running (he did stationary running in his apartment, but I couldn’t in mine without annoying the Dupuises beneath me), I still came here often after school for there was never any awkwardness about being alone and female; sometimes when I was here with Warren he was the only male in the place, sitting with me at the bar lined with UNH girls. I could quite clearly imagine, if there were boys and they caused any trouble, Dot’s charging out of the kitchen brandishing a bung starter.
She sat on her stool behind the bar, wearing a muumuu, cardigan, and slippers, putting pre-tied ribbons on Christmas presents and scribbling names on Christmas tags. “Going home for Christmas?” she asked.
The place was nearly empty. Most of the kids had already gone home. I was the only one at the bar. “No,” I said, “to my sister’s up in Cate. She has the holidays there since my niece was born, it makes things easier. I wish Christmas didn’t come so soon after Thanksgiving, it’s too exhausting to see family again so soon.”
But what would I do if I didn’t go there? Just what I’d been doing so far this vacation, working on my project for my Improvement of Reading course I’d chosen, mistakenly thinking it’d help me help my students, and correcting papers, and waiting for Warren to phone, which he hadn’t. It was to escape this that I’d come here tonight.
We’d had supper Friday night at the Pizza Hut and then had gone to his apartment. I hadn’t heard from him since. Today was Tuesday. It seemed much longer.
I said, “At least Susan doesn’t have turkey again. We never had turkey on Christmas even when we were kids.” (David’s mother always cooked a turkey on each occasion.) I picked at the damp label on my beer bottle. “My grandparents would come up to our house for Thanksgiving, but on Christmas we’d go down to their house and we’d have steak. Eggnog was the big thing, though, we’d open the presents and then my grandfather would make eggnog. My sister and I had to have plain eggnog until we were sixteen; it was quite an occasion the first Christmas we could have a cup of grown-up eggnog.”
I was asking Dot how she celebrated, did the children and grandchildren gather in the never-seen living room somewhere in this tall brown house and when did they open presents and what did they eat, but she slapped another ribbon onto another package and just said, “Jesus, do I hate doing this, I’ll never get them done, I feel so shitty,” and took a swig from her beer bottle.
When Pam was born, holidays were so much an ordeal for Ma and Pop that Lucy and David and I had the Christmas tree at Susan and John’s and then we all drove down to Lexington to visit briefly. There was no eggnog, no tree, and instead of beribboned presents there were checks written by Pop in a trembly hand. There were illnesses, too, and a sense of mourning; it was all over but for shadows. Then, after Pop died, during the last Christmas visit a stranger was in the house, a Mrs. Wright, a “companion,” who cooed at Pam and Ma equally. Lucy wept, and once more tried to convince Ma to come to live in Saundersborough, and Ma momentarily became Ma again, saying firmly she would die in this house. And she had.
Dot said, “I like Bing Crosby, do you like Bing Crosby?”
“Yes,” I said.
On the television was the annual rerun of White Christmas, with Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney, appallingly awful but pleasantly nostalgic, for I could remember seeing it in that smelly theater when I was fifteen. And it was very pretty, red and white and green.
I was fifteen when David and I started dating.
“Oh, God,” Dot said, “I can’t remember who this one’
s for.” She held up the holly-figured package. “I wrapped the damn things this morning, but then I started making Christmas cookies and I didn’t have time to put on the bows and tags. I can’t even remember what it is, what the hell do I do?”
“Open it?” I suggested.
“Think, Dorothy,” she told herself, and lit a cigarette and glared at the package, while Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen sang “Sisters” on the television.
A year ago tomorrow night David and I had been at Susan and John’s, and David and John were drinking beer while Lucy and I helped Susan dig out Pam’s presents from hiding places and arrange the packages under the tree. I was, for a change, feeling safe; this familiar ritual soothed the worry of what was the matter these past months with David. As usual, David and John bitched the familiar bitches about school, and as usual David ate the grubby peanut butter sandwich Pam had ceremoniously made for Santa Claus, and when David and I went to bed we slept on the cheap fold-down sofa which was so narrow that we had to cuddle close instead of lying apart tense and silent as we had been doing at home.
“Damn it all,” Dot said, and ripped off the wrapping paper and opened the white box. “Oh. Of course. It’s for my daughter-in-law.” She unfolded a pink nightgown. “Do you like it?”
“Yes, it’s beautiful,” I said, although it wasn’t.
She contemplated it through cigarette smoke. “I think it is, I think she’ll like it. I’d like one myself.”
I wondered for whom she’d like to wear it, and the door opened and we turned to see who’d come in.
“I’ll be damned,” I said to Kaykay Harrison and Grace Fifield.
“Exactly,” Kaykay said, climbing up on a stool and arranging her armload of store-wrapped presents on the bar. “We were just talking about you, we were just going to phone you. Two Buds, please, Dot.”
Grace said, “And a bag of those pretzels.”
Kaykay said, “Why don’t you have some potato chips, too, while you’re at it?”
Grace made sure Dot was in the kitchen and whispered, “She doesn’t have any Wise potato chips, they’re the only kind I like.”
“Go ahead,” Kaykay said, “rub it in.”
Grace was indeed thin; her straight legs below her green Loden coat reminded me of Raggedy Ann’s. Her brown hair was set in a dull medium-length hairdo, and the frames of her glasses were pale brown, not assertive horn-rims or even silly round gold-rims. She was one of those girls you knew in high school, and you never expected them to get married and were always surprised when later you learned they had, usually to someone as plain as they. Grace, who was about thirty-three, had not got married.
Dot came out with the beers, her slippers shuffling, and said, “Where’s Bob tonight, Kaykay?”
“I made him stay home so I could buy him his Christmas present. He borrowed a tuba from the school during vacation, and he’s practicing. I’ll bet the people upstairs over his apartment just love it.” Bob taught music at Hull High School, and I’d gathered that when he and Kaykay weren’t arguing about the merits of coffee ice cream they were arguing over which school had the honor of being worse, Millbridge or Hull.
“What’d you get?” Dot asked, always interested in purchases. I’d had to open bags and display a new dress, new shoes, a scarf, and underpants, on various occasions.
“I got him a Waterpik, you know those things you spray in your mouth,” Kaykay said. “He has trouble with his gums and the dentist said he ought to get one but of course he never bothered. And it’s something we can both use when we’re married.”
On trips to Saundersborough and Lexington, I packed one toothbrush, and David and I both used it.
“Then some stuff for my folks,” Kaykay said. “I’m going home tomorrow.”
Dot said, “Where is it you’re from?”
“Brompton,” Kaykay said, “God help me.”
I said, “I went to school there.”
“I went here,” she said, “probably because I was born there. Look how long Rosemary Clooney’s skirt is. Do you think we’re really going to have to wear them that long again?”
“I’ll refuse to,” I said. “I’ll start wearing pantsuits to school instead, and get fired. You were going to phone me?”
Kaykay said yes and lit a Salem. “The thing is, we’re fed up with our apartment, and Grace got looking around for someplace else to move into when I leave this summer, and she found one she liked so much she had me look at it and I practically started packing that night. I’d rather spend the rest of the year there than in our hellhole. But the rent’s pretty high, a hundred and eighty a month—”
“Jesus Christ,” Dot said, slapping on another ribbon.
“That’s what all these new apartments are asking, or more. Anyway, we figured if we split it three ways it’d only be sixty bucks each, and heavens, right now we’re forking out fifty-five each, so it wouldn’t be much of a jump for us, and for you, Emily, it’d be a saving, wouldn’t it?”
Dazed, I said, “I’m paying eighty.”
“See what I mean?” Kaykay said.
Grace said, her voice calm after Kaykay’s, “It’s that group of new apartment buildings on the way from Hull to Millbridge. They’ve finished this one and just started renting.”
“Where the milkweed was?” I said, and the door opened, we turned, and Warren and Valerie came in.
O tidings of comfort and joy.
“Well, kiddies,” Dot said. They sat down in a booth, and she went into the kitchen for their beers.
Grace said, “Would either of you like a pretzel?”
“Thank you,” I said, taking one. He must have seen my car parked outside; this then was a declaration. I hoped the blood flooding into my face didn’t make it so red as it felt. You are not going to throw up, I told myself, and you are not going to leave. I unclenched my jaws enough to eat the pretzel, swallowing carefully to keep from choking.
In the taut silence, “Goodness,” Kaykay said to Dot, who was behind the bar again, “look at all those Christmas cards.”
We looked; Santa Clauses and angels looked back at us out of the cards standing on the Kold-Draft. There was a big stack of envelopes on the ancient cash register which sat atop a pile of empty beer cartons.
“From all over,” Dot said. “You know, the kids who’ve graduated and gone away. There’s so many I haven’t even gotten around to opening half the damn things.” She glanced at me and went into the kitchen.
Kaykay said, “It has wall-to-wall carpeting. Gold. And all the kitchen stuff, the refrigerator and stove, they’re avocado.”
“On the house,” Dot said, plunking down a beer for me and a pile of Christmas cookies in a paper napkin. “Fresh made today, help yourselves.”
There were bells and stars and wreaths dusted with red and green sugar.
“Dot,” I said.
“That’s all right, you’ll be all right.”
I said, “You know what I bought my niece for Christmas? A couple of turtles. I bought them too early, though, a week ago, I knew I should’ve waited, I’ve got attached to them. I’ve even given them names, Aggy for the aggressive one and Timmy for the timid one.” I bit into a green star. “Hey, delicious, Dot. Well, what’s just occurred to me is how the hell do I get them to Cate?”
Dot and Grace and Kaykay all jumped on the conversation offering. “Are they in a tank?” “A bowl?” “Put it in a box on the car floor.” “Won’t they get cold and freeze?” “Put it near the heater.” “Put it over the tailpipe”—from Dot. “Where’s the tailpipe?”—from me. Kaykay said, “I wonder if you should take the water out, they might get seasick.”
Then Grace said, “Do you have a lease on your apartment?”
“No.”
“Neither do we,” Kaykay said, “so I guess we’re all set. Aren’t we?”
I was trying to think of it and not of Warren sitting over there, tall, his smooth dark hair and silky sideburns. Christ, I thought, it’d be like being in school
again, with roommates, or would it be a Hull attempt at the life shown in slick movies about girls living in New York, nylons drying in the bathroom, the telephone constantly ringing, and cocktail parties? Then I thought of going home now and climbing the stairs through the supper smells from Mrs. Crabtree’s and the Dupuises’ apartments, to my dark apartment and my homework and the turtles. What was the point of it, what was I doing here? And no Warren anymore. Alone. I thought of the mirror.
Kaykay said, “Aren’t we?”
“Give her time,” Grace said. “There’s the moving to consider, all the packing and everything.”
I said, “I haven’t got much to pack,” and ate a red bell. “All right,” I said.
PART TWO: THE ROOMMATES
“IF WE had a bottle of champagne,” Kaykay said while around us people jabbered hoarse through cigarette smoke, “we ought to break it across a corner of the building.”
We had a great many things on the coffee table, on the end tables, on the kitchen counter, but we didn’t have any champagne. We had scotch and bourbon and gin and beer, however, and all the goodies Kaykay and Grace and I had shopped for in the morning and spent the afternoon preparing, the sort of goodies I used to look at pictures of in magazines and clip out recipes of and save for the parties David and I never could afford to give.
Dips and spreads, potato chips, corn chips, cheeses and crackers, shrimps, cocktail sauce. The preparations had been frivolous and fun, arranging cherry tomatoes and mushrooms and cucumber slices around a bowl of sour cream, making a pretty pattern, ignoring the knowledge that the pattern would be ruined the moment someone took a piece; it had been like playing house.
And this was a housewarming party, or rather, as Kaykay pointed out, a building launching. Ours, a downstairs apartment, was the first apartment to be rented. And so far the party was quite a success, with teachers and their wives or husbands getting cheerfully drunk, and Bob, Kaykay’s fiancé, playing his guitar.
One Minus One (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 6
