"No thanks." Oh God, Frances thought in pure terror, is that what I'm becoming? Is that me in twenty years? She said coldly, "I think you've made a mistake. I have an appointment with my husband."
"Oh, now look"
"I'm in a hurry."
She pushed her way to the cashier and paid for her coffee, ignoring the stares of the other customers.
It was beginning to snow. The sidewalks were slippery with half-frozen slush, and a cold wind blew off Lake Michigan. Frances shivered. The soles of her shoes would be soaked through in a few minutes, and she was already chilled to the bone.
Where do you go when there's no place you belong?
She sneezed. It's no time to be melodramatic, she admonished herself. Go home, get into a hot tub, take a couple of aspirins and get into bed.
She got into a southbound bus and sat huddled miserably next to a fat salesman with a smelly cigar, trying to think about the mess she had made of her life, but able only to think of her warm, waiting bed.
CHAPTER 15
“We going to have a Christmas tree this year?"
Frances studied her son's face. It was a replica of Bill's, only a little younger now than the face Bill had worn when she first knew him. He was as tall as Bill and as broad, too, and his hands were those of a grown man, hard from tennis and basketball and the summer job, with hair on the backs. A boy's question in a man's voice, making her smile.
"Of course, Christmas tree and all the fixings. Why?"
"Nothing." He leaned against the door jamb, watching her as she moved from sink to table to stove.
She slid a panful of cookies into the oven and closed the door carefully. "What's on your mind?"
"Nothing." But he didn't meet her eyes. "You suppose you could call Mari up and invite her for Christmas dinner?"
"Why, I guess so."
In spite of his casual tone, she knew suddenly that this meant a lot to him. He had been thinking about it for quite a while, trying to think of an approach that was sufficiently casual, because it meant so much.
"She's a nice girl. Only won't her family want her at home on Christmas Day?"
"Aw, they eat at night. I'm going over then."
"Think you can eat two holiday meals?"
Bob grinned. "I'll pass up the bread and potatoes," he said, sounding eighteen again. "You call her up and invite her, huh?"
"Why so formal all of a sudden? You've been bringing kids home for meals as long as I can remember.”
He said gravely, "Mari is no kid."
She looked at him sharply, disquieted as she had been by her first glimpse of the girl's serene, closed face. He reddened.
She was aware of a mixture of emotions: amusement at the sight of her boy putting on man's ways, tenderness for the child he had been, nostalgia for the days when the three of them had really been a family, resentment because his growing up meant that her own youth was slipping away.
She said flatly, "Sure, I'll call her up if it means so much to you."
"Thanks."
She bent to turn the oven down a trifle, and straightened up to tear yesterday's page off the wall calendar. December 24. Five years ago she would have been downtown, on the day before Christmas, jostled by tired shoppers, trying to spread the saved-up grocery money over all the things Bob wanted. Toys were marked down on the day before Christmas, and so were trees in the open-air lots.
She said aloud, "Remember the little table tree we had in Fayetteville?" and turned to catch Bob's answer, but he was gone. Off to tell his girl she was going to be officially invited to dinner, she supposed.
You wouldn't catch Bill Ollenfield lugging home a bargain tree, on Christmas Eve this year, getting spruce needles all over his old jacket, staying up until after midnight to hang the colored lights and dime-store trinkets and the silver tinsel. He would be at the office, going over his damned old reports and adding up the take from the pre-Christmas boom. Plastic Playthings were on every dime-store counter in the United States, she guessed. Cheap junk, most of them would be broken by New Year's Day. But they were important enough to keep a busy executive away from his family. If he stayed home all day on the twenty-fifth she would be surprised.
She supposed he had a present for her, something or other his secretary had picked up on her lunch hour, gift-wrapped by Carson's or Marshall Field's professional wrapping service. He didn't have to go without lunches any more in order to buy her a pair of nylons or a small bottle of perfume. She had bought him a watch, ten dollars down and ten a month until it was paid for, hoping against hope that the generosity of the gift would crack the polite impersonality that had formed around him, like a thin coating of ice. As a gift it didn't really mean anything.
There would have to be a gift for Mari too, something impersonal but goodnot an easy decision to make. She suspected that Mari was selective about her possessions, was used to having the best.
Well, she couldn't call Mari until Bob got back. She didn't know the girl's phone number or address. She tried to put out of her mind the memory of Bob's young face so intent and full of love, of Mari's pure oval at once so serene and so unrevealing. This was more than another girl friend. I feel like a mother-in-law, she thought wryly.
The front door opened and shut again. Bill came through the house, shedding his overcoat on the davenport as he passed, dropping his briefcase on the coffee table. He stood in the doorway as Bob had done, taking in the fragrance of browning dough and the clutter of baking utensils on the dinette table.
Frances said, "Hi," looking away from him, her hands busy. He didn't answer.
Stubborn as a mule, she thought. She ran hot water into a mixing bowl.
He took down a whiskey bottle from the top shelf of the cupboard, poured a little into a plastic tumbler, and stood sipping it slowly, looking away from her.
There was a smell of scorching, a puff of acrid smoke. She rushed to the oven and pulled out the cookie sheet. At the sight of the charred lumps she began to cry, idiotically. Bill set down his glass.
"Scrape it in the garbage," he said a little thickly. "It's no great loss."
Anger flamed in her. "Thanks. If that's all you've got to say, you might as well keep still."
"You haven't got anything to complain of." Bill refilled the glass, his hand shaking so that a little of the clear light liquid spilled over. "You've got it pretty soft."
"Have I? You haven't said a decent word to me since"
"Go ahead and say it. Since you and your crummy friends went to jail." His face darkened. "I suppose that was my fault."
"Yes, it wasif you really want to know. You don't even know I'm alive. You're so wrapped up in your damned old plastics business you don't have any room in your life for human beings." She was good and angry now, all the accumulated resentment of the last few years coming to a rolling boil. "You don't need me. You wouldn't even care if I got out of here and let you marry somebody elseyou'd probably be glad. You aren't human."
"What I can't see is, what are you complaining about? Because I bailed you out, or because I don't make love to you as often as you might like, or what?"
"Well, you haven't been very friendly."
"Okay." Bill's face was flushed. He had put on weight in the last few months; his belly was beginning to round out under the white shirt, and he had the first sag of a double chin. His eyes were bloodshot, whether from overwork or alcohol, she couldn't tell. He had begun drinking, probably, before he came home. His own office was officially closed for the day but salesmen would have been in from out of town, and he might have made the rounds of other people's office parties before drifting in.
"Okay," he said again. "Come on upstairs, if you're so damn anxious to be noticed."
"Don't be silly."
"Come on."
She took a silver knife from the drawer and began to scratch at the burned baking sheet.
He seized her wrist. The knife clattered to the floor. "By God, I've taken a lot from you, but I'm not going to tak
e any more. Come on upstairs, or I'll drag you up."
His hand was like steel. She tried to pull away. His grip tightened. "Upstairs," he said, and the quietness of his voice was a threat.
She followed him up the back stairs step by step, balking at each one, pulled along by the implacable band of fingers around her wrist.
He shut the bedroom door behind them before he let her go. Then he pulled down the shade, making dusk in the room, shutting out the cold winter light and the suddenly friendly, everyday view of street and houses. Frances stood warily by the wall, seeing the room where she had slept so many nights suddenly become an alien and frightening place, a prison.
She said coldly, "You're drunk."
"Not too drunk for what I'm going to do. You don't need to worry about that." He caught her by the shoulder as she edged toward the door. "Anyhow," he said, "you seem to like your friends that way."
He stripped off her clothes like a farmer husking corn, and threw her down on the bed so hard the springs rattled. She shut her eyes.
He was quick and violent, a stranger seeking fast relief, using her for his own need and unaware of her as a person. Like a man in a two-dollar whorehouse, she thought, despising the woman and in a hurry to get away. In almost no time he was done with her. He rolled over and sat on the edge of the bed, white in the cold half-light. A faint stale odor of alcohol hung around him.
She lay without moving or speaking, too miserable even to pull up the covers.
He got into his clothing quickly and efficiently, as though he were getting up to go to work. At the door he turned, looking uncertain for the first time. "Frances"
She didn't answer.
She lay there for a long time after the downstairs door slammed. At last she began to shiver in the cold air. She drew the sheet up under her chin. Immediately, as though the motion had set her thoughts to wheeling, reality pressed in upon her. She lay looking at nothing, reliving the events of the last few hours. The pleasure of working in her clean light kitchen, a pleasure she had almost forgotten since she started going to business, intensified by the making of holiday cookies. I was almost happy, she thought in wonder. It seemed to her that she hadn't been happy for a long time.
The odd mixture of feelings that rippled the surface of her mind when Bob spoke of the girl, Mari. Quick admiration for one so young and in every way desirable, followed by the jealousy of a maturing woman for a young one and then by the fear of losing Bob to an early marriage. And the quick blazing up of her anger at Bill, held in check so long, like a fire that has smoldered for a long time and then, fanned by a sudden wind, shoots up to the sky. It had made her feel good to be angry, like having a clean sharp pain after months of a dull nagging infection.
Then, suddenly, the indignity of being dragged upstairs bodily by a man half drunk and used for the discharge of a passion that was more hate than love. She felt violated. She felt dirty, as though she would never be clean again. She lay with her hands outside the covers, as though her skin were unclean to the touch.
But this was nothing new. She had been through this beforethe cringing sickness, the dull wish that she could shut her eyes on the whole confused mess and never open them again, the dragging fatigue. She lay slack-muscled, her hands lax against the bedspread, remembering.
CHAPTER 16
She had been too tired, the second night after her mother's death, to be capable of emotion. The sights and smells of a cancer patient's dying were incredible. She didn't blame her father for staying away and, when he did come home, taking the edge off his misery with drink. She came back from the graveyard to a house put in unaccustomed order by the neighbor women, a kitchen table loaded with offerings of food: ham, potato salad, cake, pie. After the weeks of unremitting work, there was suddenly nothing to do.
The afternoon was endless. She thought about writing to Miss PutnamMiss Putnam had sent flowers and a note. But there was nothing to say. She was staying in this place she hated, taking over the drudgery, because there was nothing else to do. She accepted it. But the hurt was still too new and raw to admit of words.
She sat on the living room cot, her handscallused, water-soaked, stubby-nailedidle in her lap.
I can't go through with it.
You have to.
She must have dozed, for some time later she woke, startled and frightened. For a moment she thought she was back in the dorm, jerked awake by the clangor of Sondy's alarm clock. Then realization flooded in. She got up stiffly and walked to the window, aching in every muscle. The children were playing in the dusk, still in their new clothes. She called them in, gave them ham, cake, potato salad. She made coffee and sat at the kitchen table drinking it, too weary to swallow solid food.
Lorena said, "Pa went off someplace. I hate Pa."
"Never mind that. Wipe the crumbs off your face, then pick up these dishes for methat's a good girl." Frankie smiled thinly. "I'll take care of Pa."
After the children were in bed and the dishes washed, she sat down again on the cot and tried to plan for tomorrow. Pa wouldn't go to work, of course. He was in the tavern at this very minute, not paying for his own drinks tonight but being treated to round after round by his friends and neighbors. At least he's not taking the food out of the children's mouths, she thought. She lit the kerosene lamp and lay down, fixing her gaze on the nimbus of soft yellow light that hovered around the thin glass chimney.
She dozed again. This time she was waked by blundering footsteps across the kitchen floor and the crashing of an overturned chair, followed by a muffled curse. Dead drunk, of course. It was what she had expected. She got to her feet.
Joe Kirby swayed in the doorless space between the living room and bedroom, clutching at the jamb for steadiness. The smell of whiskey preceded him into the room, and his eyes were bloodshot. Oh sure, Frankie thought, he wouldn't be drinking beer tonight. Bottled in bond, that's what it would be, paid for out of someone else's grocery money. There would be some husbands getting hell tomorrow.
He wavered in her direction. "Nancy, honey."
She had never seen him this far gone. Muddled, yes, and bad-tempered past reason, but not out of his head. He thinks I'm Ma, she realized. Slipped a cog somewhere. She said coldly, "Why don't you go to bed and sleep it off?"
"Nancy, you look so pretty."
She moved away, warily. The old childish fear of him held her spellbound for a moment. Then her new cold determination took over. "You're disgusting. Go to bed."
"Come on with me, then." He stood in front of her, wavering. "Come on, honey. You and me's gonna have a real good time together."
She was seized by sudden teeth-chattering panic.
He reached for her, missed, and moved in closer. Her back was to the old cot where she had slept since babyhood. The wall was behind her, the door on the opposite side of the room. There was a window at the foot of the cot, screened with cotton mosquito netting. She could squeeze through it if she had to.
But now he had grabbed her and tipped back her head, his breath hot and stinking on her cheek, and she couldn't move.
"Don't be like this, Nancy honey."
"I'm Frances. You hear me, Frances!" Her voice rose to a shriek. Never mind if the children woke. Anything was better than what she read on his facenaked lust, determined male hunger.
He pushed her back against the cot. The metal frame caught her behind the knees and she went down sprawling.
He'll kill me if I fight back, she thought wildly. An hour before she had been telling herself that she had nothing left to live for. Now all she could think was that she didn't want to die. She was filled with a wild primitive need to survive.
She lay still for a moment, trying to look into his face, trying to focus her eyes on the opposite wall. His grip slacked a little. He shifted position, peering stupidly into her face.
Now.
She brought her right knee up sharply. He howled. She pushed at him. Caught off balance by pain and surprise, he toppled to the floor and sat roc
king back and forth, moaning loudly.
She went out of the house, walking past him neither slowly nor fast, and not looking at him. Outside, a cold early-winter wind blew sharply against her sweaty body. She shuddered. But she stayed out huddled against the side of the house for shelter, until she saw through the bedroom window that he had dragged himself to bed and fallen into a sodden sleep.
CHAPTER 17
I can’t beat it, she thought, turning her head from side to side as Ma had done when the pain got too bad. Men. Dirty, selfish, disgustingviolaters and savages. I'll never let a man touch me again, she thought.
Bill as bad as the rest of them, just like the rest. This was something she had heard beforeshe tried, frowning, to remember when and where. Kay, of course, sitting relaxed and easy on Bake's studio couch, one slender leg tucked under her, a cup of coffee in her hand, her dark-red hair catching the light.
"Every time he made love to me it was like a declaration of war. It was like being beaten, only worse." She had smiled, and Frances' heart had swelled with understanding and pity. "You'll never get any consideration from a man, anyway. There's no tenderness in them. All they think about is their own satisfaction."
Frances turned restlessly, remembering. "It takes a woman to understand another woman," Kay said, turning her coffee cup on its saucer and not looking at any of them. "She thinks about the other person, not always about herself. If you're tired, a woman will be gentle and patientif she loves you. If you're ill she takes care of you. When you're in the mood to make love she knows how to make you feel wonderful. It's better than anything with a man."
And Bake had answeredFrances couldn't remember what, but she could hear Bake's voice hanging soft in the air of the room, agreeing; and she could remember sharply every detail of that night, after the others went home and the logs in the fireplace had burned down to ashes.
Now, she thought, I like Kay. She's wise, she understands things. I wish I could talk to her about Bake. Can't, of course, because there's Janethe whole miserable mess revolves around Jane. She lay thinking about Jane and Kay and the probable implications of their friendship, distracted briefly from her own unhappiness. Kay's too good for her. she thought, picturing Kay's intelligent face with its high cheekbones, her sensitive mouth, her silky red-brown hair.
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