“When I consider,” Cliff Parker, the head of the English Department, was saying to the French teacher, “when I consider the phases of my life, I find that they are marked by the automobiles I’ve owned. My résumé is a junkyard.”
“It takes a worried man,” Bob sang very loudly, “to sing a worried song.” But he didn’t appear at all worried. He was overweight and jolly, and now, because of the heat of the room and his exertions and the drinks, his face had a glazed baked look, like a round pink plate.
A science teacher said, “Did you hear the one about the woman who’d been married three times and was still a virgin?”
“How could she still be a virgin?” someone asked dutifully.
“I’m worried now,” Bob sang, “but I won’t be worried long.”
“Well, her first husband was a psychiatrist, and he just talked about it, and her second husband was a gynecologist and he just looked at it, and her third husband was a gourmet.”
Somebody’s cigarette scorched my arm. I turned and saw Cliff Parker.
I said, “Speaking of gourmets, I had the weirdest dream the other night about the Galloping Gourmet french-frying yards of toilet paper for a women’s liberation group to throw at some personage in protest.”
“It’d be a disconcerting attack, wouldn’t it?” he said. “How do you like this place?”
“Well,” I said, and looked around. The little kitchen was separated from the living room by a Formica counter for which we’d bought barstools whose plastic-cushioned tops unfortunately made embarrassing noises when you sat down on them. There was the avocado-green refrigerator and stove Kaykay had promised. And in the living room was the gold wall-to-wall carpet. The walls themselves were white. “Well,” I said again.
Most of the furniture was Grace’s. It was traditional, and the sofa and chairs all had skirts, even the ottoman had a skirt, and everything matched, a print of blue and cream. I’d been bored by it the minute I saw it, and now it was simply objects to sit on.
But Grace’s choosing this style was somehow pathetically poignant, especially her bringing it to this bleak new brick-faced building surrounded by cement mixers and piles of girders and the beginnings of other identical buildings rising from the snow-crusted ravaged earth. She wanted tradition; she was not camping out, as Kaykay and I were; she was making a home.
“Well,” I said once more. “At least we don’t have to sweat yet about the noise annoying anybody upstairs.”
Bob sang, “Twenty-nine links of chain around my leg.”
I said, “Sing the verse about the little bitty hand waving after me, that’s Pete Seeger’s favorite verse, I heard him say so on TV.”
“You watch his show?” Bob asked, pausing to take a swallow from his highball glass.
“Of course I did, while it was still on, and when it went off I nearly wrote the station a vicious letter, but I never seem to get around to writing any of the vicious letters I want to. Pete Seeger’s my hero,” I added, and then realized what I’d let myself in for. Chatty Emily after too many drinks.
“Hey,” he said, “that’s right, Kaykay told me, where’s that banjo of yours?”
Cliff said, “You play a banjo?”
Drunk enough not to be coy, I headed for the bedroom, ducking lifted elbows, dodging cigarettes. Grace was picking an olive pit out of her philodendron.
Kaykay and I shared the larger bedroom; Grace had the smaller all to herself. Their old curtains didn’t fit these windows, so it’d been necessary to go shopping for some; Kaykay and I chose yellow and purple flowers to compete with the white walls, and Grace chose rose organdy. It’d also been necessary for me to buy a bed, the first single bed I’d slept in, except when I was staying with Lucy during the divorce, since I got married. I had bought a second-hand bureau, too, and a cheap yellow bedspread like Kaykay’s. Grace had an antique-white Heirloom bedspread.
I took the banjo out of its case and went back to the living room and snaked the ottoman away from a math teacher who’d left it unguarded to get some bleu cheese dip.
“I’ll play ‘Cripple Creek,’” I announced, and sat down and did so. The sharp crackle of noise momentarily deafened everyone into silence, and I grinned at them, not in the least flustered by having an audience, although I hadn’t played at a party since Brompton. And although I hadn’t played much at all lately, only a couple of times for Warren and once for Grace and Kaykay and a few times for myself when the excitement of the songs could make me forget singing them with David, my fingers remembered and it went fast and crisp. “Now,” I said, “let’s do ‘Worried Man’ again,” and Bob and I sang, “I looked down that track just as far as I could see, little bitty hand was waving after me,” and I wondered if I’d begun to regress or what, first the make-believe of the party preparations, and now this, which was like being back in high school, or at Brompton before we got married, being once again Emily Bean who played a banjo.
“Whew,” I said, “would you like to play it?” and handed it to Bob. “I’ve got to get a drink.”
In the kitchen, people on their hands and knees were patting at the floor.
Joanne Webster, the art teacher, said, “Have you seen a contact lens anyplace, Emily? I lost a contact,” and Kaykay, crawling across the floor, looked up and said, “Are you sure you didn’t swallow it? I knew somebody once, it fell out in their drink and they swallowed it.”
Joanne said, “No, I didn’t swallow it, I’d know it if I swallowed it.”
Grace said, “You’re sure you lost it here, not in the living room?”
“I burned one once,” Joanne said. “I took them out to go to bed and one stuck to my finger and when I put out my cigarette it fell in the ashtray and I put the cigarette out on it, but I never swallowed one.”
An English teacher said, “If it’s in the living room, it’s a goner.”
“Here’s a smoked oyster,” someone called from behind the wastebasket.
“Maybe it was the living room,” Joanne said, and in the living room Bob sang, “I know a girl in Boston, Mass., she has freckles on her ass.”
“Oh, God,” Kaykay said, “he’s gotten to the dirty-songs stage.” She scrambled to her feet and seized a tray off the counter and swayed slightly. She apparently had also reached a stage. The tray tilted; a sardine flopped off a cracker. “Sardine, anyone? Bob,” she called, working her way through the people toward him, “Bob, wouldn’t you like a nice sardine?”
He was playing his guitar again, and the banjo was lying on the floor by his chair, so I rescued it from the danger of feet and carried it into the bedroom.
After I’d put the banjo back in the case, I took Ma’s diary out of my top bureau drawer and opened it to my bookmark. I shoved aside the coats piled on my bed and sat down, and, by the dim light of the tiny hallway, I read: “Sun., May 13, 1906. Our first dinner party! Mr. and Mrs. Spencer the guests. I cooked everything & it was fine—chicken soup, lamb (roast), gravy, scalloped potatoes, asparagus on toast, fruit meringue, coffee.”
Down the hall the toilet flushed. I heard footsteps and someone humming a TV commercial, and when I looked up I saw that Cliff had stopped by the open door. “Double-good Doublemint Gum,” he hummed, and focused his blue eyes on me. “Emily. Are you all right, is anything wrong?”
“No, no, just having a little quiet.”
“Would you like a drink?”
“Got one, thanks,” I said, holding up my glass. But the thought of a cigarette occurred to me, and it seemed a very pleasant thought. “Could I perhaps bum a Pall Mall?”
He came in and gave me one and lit it for me. Then he pushed aside more coats and sat down. “That looks like rather an old diary.”
“It’s my grandmother’s.” And because he was boozed-up and informal, not in a suit but in a turtleneck and plaid bell-bottoms, just as I was, and with his brown-and-gray hair and beard all curly and tousled, I forgot he was my boss long enough to risk being foolish and confide, “She’s been married
about a month and a half and she’s giving her first dinner party,” and I read him what she’d cooked.
For a little time we smoked in silence.
Then he said, “Not exactly clam dip, is it?”
“No,” I said, and stood up and got an ashtray off Kaykay’s bedside table and sat back down and flicked off a curve of ash. I’d suddenly wanted to touch his beard. I’d never touched a beard before, and I’d suddenly wondered if it were like pubic hair. Shock at myself became amusement; I laughed and said, “They’re out in Butte, Montana, and it’s nineteen-o-six. They went out there right after they got married, and they stayed four years, and when they came back home to Lexington they lived the rest of their lives in the house that had been my great-grandparents’.”
Kaykay went past the door, on her way to the bathroom, and saw us and waved. In the living room Bob was singing, “It’s me, it’s me, I’m home from the sea, said Barnacle Bill the sailor.”
Cliff leaned back against coats. “My grandparents never made it as far as Montana. They lived all their lives in the same place, and so have my parents, just about. North Riverton.”
Which was near Thornhill. I said, “I’ll be damned, I lived in Thornhill eight years. Small state, isn’t it?”
“You did, did you like it?”
“Oh, yes, well, I—”
We both stubbed out our cigarettes and took a drink.
He said, “What I want most is to go back and teach there.”
“It’s not a particularly whoopee neck of the woods for a bachelor.”
“Oh, I could have an occasional fling at the Riverton Inn if it hasn’t collapsed from dry rot by now.”
“The Riverton Inn,” I said, “for heaven’s sake, we once stopped there for a beer. We. That is—” If I was beginning to be able to mention him as a figure in my life, what could I call him? Ex-husband? Good God. “The guy I used to be married to,” I said at last, and thought that David was not simply a figure in my life but the main part of it, the main part of all my memories, all my history.
Cliff glanced at me as if he wanted to ask something, but apparently he too shied away from direct questions, for he said instead, “I’d like to get back up there and enjoy it during the time we’ve got left before the entire state becomes one great big playground full of Massachusetts tourists.”
Kaykay went past again, returning from the bathroom, and waved again.
I said, “The reason I’m down here is to pick up some credits at UNH.” I was asking him why he was here.
He said, “What a fate,” and offered me another cigarette. “I went to school here and stayed on and got my master’s, to get everything over with all at once.” While he reflectively tapped his cigarette before putting it in his mouth (might his beard or mustache catch on fire if he smoked it too short?), I swiped his matches and lit my cigarette. He said, “I’m here because I was offered head of the department and I was too greedy to resist. It at least got me back to New Hampshire; I’d been teaching in Massachusetts for years.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Pepsi’s got a lot to give,” he hummed. Then he reached over and rumpled my hair. “Hey, I thought so, it’s shorter than mine.”
I touched his beard. It felt as tough and wiry as a Brillo pad. Then he kissed me, and we were lying among the coats. The booze said yes, but I said no.
“Our cigarettes,” I said, struggling to sit up, “we’ll burn everyone’s coats and get sued.”
He laughed, and we sat up and I flicked ashes at the ashtray while he put out his cigarette. Fleetingly I wondered where he lived, if we could go there, and then I remembered he was my boss and this was impossible. I wasn’t brave enough to sit at department meetings and discuss gerunds and Julius Caesar with him while everyone guessed we were sleeping together.
“And anyway,” I said, not realizing I was saying it aloud, “I’m never getting involved with a man ever again,” and I finished my drink and stubbed out my cigarette.
“What, never?” Cliff said.
The Gilbert and Sullivan response came automatically. “Well, hardly ever,” I said, and he kissed me and his hand was warm on my breast.
Luckily at that moment I heard Bob. “Roll me ooover,” he bellowed, “in the cloover.”
“Oh, Jesus,” I said, starting to laugh, and I jumped up and opened the banjo case and said, “I’m going to drown him out. Any requests?”
“How about ‘It’s Hard, Ain’t It Hard’?” he suggested as he lit a new cigarette.
“Sorry about that,” I said, laughing, “I’m sorry.”
I ran into the living room and sat down on the floor and began to play.
Grace and I usually spent Friday night alone watching television, while Kaykay cooked supper for Bob at his apartment and then stayed overnight with him. Kaykay and Bob were already very organized about their sex life, something, I realized, David and I had never been, especially after my change from diaphragm to Pill. We had been exuberantly spontaneous, sometimes embarrassingly so, like the time at Brompton the bed broke one sunny afternoon when wives and children from the other apartments were sitting and playing in the front yard right outside our open bedroom window.
This Friday night in February, Grace and I were watching The Name of the Game as usual, and then she suddenly put down her dish of strawberry ice cream and said, “I ought to go see my sister, I haven’t seen her since we moved here and of course she can’t get out much because of the kids.”
I said, “I didn’t know you had a sister.” I only knew she had parents she ate dinner with every Sunday.
“Oh, heavens, I’ve got two sisters. The one I was thinking of is Wendy, she’s the youngest, she’s twenty-one. Sort of a mistake, I guess. All Mom’s friends were pretty horrified when they found out Mom was pregnant at thirty-four.” She smiled at me, but we were both thinking that here we were, thirty and thirty-three, not even having begun on children and unlikely to.
I offered, “My mother didn’t get around to having me, her first kid, until she was thirty-two. She had my sister when she was thirty-four.”
Grace went into the kitchen and rinsed her dish. “My other sister, Norma, is a couple of years older than me. Her husband is a salesman at Glidden Ford, that’s where I bought my car. They’ve got a nice house in that development on the Hull Point Road. And they have a daughter who’s a sophomore and a son in junior high. Bob knows the kids.” She dried her hands on a dish towel. “All in all, I have five nephews and nieces.”
“Wow,” I said.
She said, “I met Norma in the dry cleaner’s last week and she told me she’s started going to a ceramics class Thursday nights.”
I watched her push back her cuticles with the towel and then squirt hand cream out of the dispenser bottle on the sink counter into her palm.
I said, “I suppose ceramics might be fun. More fun than Analysis of Teaching,” which was the course I was grimly taking this semester.
“Well, she says it gets her out of the house.”
But Grace wanted desperately to be in a house.
Rubbing her hands, she laughed and said, “For a while, whenever I saw Norma all she did was ask me if I had a boyfriend and if I was getting married, and she used to get so mad at me for being bridesmaids and maids of honor in other people’s weddings, she used to say, ‘You’re not going to be in another wedding!’ She really believed always-a-bridesmaid-never-a-bride, can you imagine? Nowadays when I see her she tells me how lucky I am to be out in the world doing things on my own. Out in the world! Millbridge High School!” and she laughed again.
During these past couple of months I had begun to sense the great hurt in Grace, far greater than her composed appearance and neat habits suggested. Despite her furniture, Grace was not resigned to her life and never had been.
She said, “I did get some lovely dresses out of all those weddings, and I’ve even worn a few of them again, for chaperoning and banquets and things. Were you ever a bridesmaid?”
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“No,” I said. “I was away at Brompton when my high school friends started getting married, and none of my Brompton friends had a real wedding. Are weddings a good time?”
“Some of them, and they’re always so pretty. The dresses—would you like to see the dresses?”
We went into her rose-and-white bedroom. She opened her closet, pushed aside school clothes, and brought out garment bags.
“This one was a winter wedding,” she said, spreading a green velvet gown on the bed, “and this was Norma’s wedding, and this was a friend’s in high school, and this was my roommate’s at Plymouth, and this was Wendy’s, and here’s the latest, when I was maid of honor for the girl I roomed with before Kaykay.”
And there they were, the green velvet, the chiffons and satins and silks, yellow and pink and lavender, all flowing across her single bed.
“I shortened the one from Wendy’s wedding and wore it to the senior dance last year with the fellow I was going with then.”
Kaykay had told me that he was a social studies teacher who had moved on to Rhode Island. His replacement was married, so there was no replacement for him in Grace’s life this year.
Grace slowly began to hang the gowns back in the bags. “Isn’t it awful?” she said. “Forty or fifty dollars for each one, and only a few of them I’ve ever worn again, such an awful waste,” but her hand stroked chiffon and silk.
She said, “Would you like to come along? To Wendy’s?”
I thought of the rest of the evening alone with the television. “Why, yes, that’d be nice.”
We put on our coats and got our pocketbooks and went out to her car. It was a dark-red Mustang which she took to an automatic car wash every Sunday morning. It gleamed in the night. I hadn’t yet found the courage to try to drive through a car wash or even to go to a do-it-yourself one, so the battle David had fought to keep the salt on the roads in winter from rusting out the Falcon was beginning to be lost.
Grace drove very calmly and competently. Kaykay drove her Volkswagen too fast and impatiently. And I myself still drove in a constant state of terror, seeing myself smashed dead by every oncoming car.
One Minus One (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 7
