A double need began to grow in her. First came the need to be cherished and comforted, a yearning that nobody ever outgrows. She wanted to see Bake and confide everything that had happened, and lay her head on Bake's shoulder and cry a little. She wanted to feel Bake's hands on her body in gentleness, and Bake's cheek laid softly against hers in their own special caress. That would be enough for a while, she thought, defending herself against any suspicion of lust, since lust had so lately been her undoing.
But under this loneliness that she could acknowledge a stronger hunger began to grow, insistent and clamoring. She began to count the days since she had seen Bake. Almost a month, after two years of being together.
Bill's abrupt and brutal lovemaking, shocking as it had been, had stirred needs in her that were deeper than principle or conscious thought. She turned, throwing the blankets to the floor. Clear in her mind was the picture of Bake standing at the head of the stairs, wrapped snugly in her housecoat, watching an angry unforgiving Frances walk out. How could I do it? she asked herself. How could I be so wicked?
Bake, ivory pale in the moonlight; Bake tousle-headed over morning coffee; Bake warm and drowsy at three o'clock of a rainy summer daybreak, when lightning crashed across the sky and water streamed down the window.
Bake.
Frances got stiffly out of bed, noting that her knees ached when she stood up and that an ugly purple bruise was forming inside her right thigh. Her clothes lay in an untidy pile where Bill had thrown them, one shoe upside down on her wool skirt, her stockings curled like empty snakeskins. She stepped around them, and pulled her terry robe down from a closet hook.
The telephone waited for her, ready to come to life at her touch. Her finger slipped easily into the dial holes. She waited, scarcely breathing, until the ringing stopped and Bake's voice answered, impersonal and low.
"It's twelve o'clock, baby. Merry Christmas."
"Merry Christmas to you, too." Frances shifted her position so that she could see the bedside clock. "I have to go home."
"Oh God, do we have to go through all that again?"
"I'm sorry. Bob's girl is coming for dinner, and some other people later." She could see the Flanagans' faces if they arrived and found her missing. She started to giggle, then stopped, warned by the tight look around Bake's mouth. "I know it sounds silly. I hate it being this way, but I have to. I can't get out of it."
"It's up to you. If you'd rather spend the day being a nice little hausfrau"
"I don't want to. I don't want to go home at all."
"Don't let me stop you.”
"Darling, do we have to be like this?"
"Well, you can't expect me to be happy about the way you're carrying on." Bake got to her feet and stretched, yawning. "First you're all set to leave your husband and move in hereI was running around trying to find a lawyer for you, I supposed you meant it when you said you were through with Bill. The next thing I know you're flouncing out of the place in a tantrum. Never going to speak to me again. I know, I know," she said, motioning for Frances not to interrupt, "you were mad at me. We don't have to go through that all over again, do we? So now you come back and everything's going to be fine. Except you still think more of that damn man than you do of me."
"I don't. I wish I never had to see him again."
"He's worse than stodgy and stupid, he's vicious too. Look at the bruises on you. Well," Bake said, "there's a masochist for every sadist, but I didn't have you pegged for one."
"Look, I'd just as soon leave him. I'm going to leave him. Only I can't walk out on Christmas Day."
"Why not?"
"Oh Bake, don't spoil everything."
Bake sat down on the edge of the bed, reaching for a cigarette. Frances' eyes filled with tears. I don't want to fight, she thought. We never used to fight. Now we're getting edgy with each other, like a husband and wife that have outgrown affection but are still bound together by habit and physical need. It's all wrong.
She turned her face away, wiping her wet eyes on the hem of the pillowcase. In childish need of reassurance, she grasped at the little ritual that had ended so many hours together. "Bake, give me a cigarette."
Bake handed her the package.
"Oh, never mind. I have to hurry."
"Now what's the matter?"
"Nothing."
Realization crossed Bake's face. She took another cigarette, scratched one of her kitchen matches across the underside of the night stand. "You're being pretty infantile."
Hurt swelled Frances' throat so she couldn't answer. She got up quickly, gathered her clothes from the slipper chair and carried them into the bathroom. Bake sat watching her, narrow-eyed. Then she stubbed out her own cigarette and followed.
"Look, baby, you're making something out of nothing."
Frances reached for her blue toothbrush, hanging companionably beside Bake's red one. Over a mouthful of foam she turned hurt and anxious eyes on Bake.
"You're so damn possessive." Bake sat down gingerly on the edge of the tub. "Ouch, this is cold. Look, you can't own the people you care for. If love isn't a free gift, then it's nothing."
"Words."
"Okay, I'll give it to you straight. I have a life of my own to live. I can't sit around mooning about you all the time. You don't have to get your feelings hurt every time you turn around."
"My feelings are not hurt."
"They are too. You're madder than hell because I forgot to light your cigarette for you."
Frances said in a low voice, "It's only because you mean so much to me."
"Nobody'd ever guess it. Look, you can stay here if you want to. We have all day, a whole day with nobody else barging in. But no, you'd rather go back to that place and knock yourself out cooking a big dinner for that creep you're married to. After he as good as raped you, too."
"I'm not doing it for him. Can't you get that through your head?"
"Go ahead, go. Maybe he'll give you another good going-over tonight. Won't that be fun?"
"Oh, shut up!" It was the first time she had ever yelled at Bake and they were both astounded. Frances blinked back the hot tears. "I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry too. Only it might be a good idea to make up your mind whether you're my girl or Bill's wife, don't you think so? These double-gaited people who keep switching back and forth make me kind of sick to my stomach."
Frances began to pull on her clothes. There was nothing she could say. Technically, she supposed, Bake was right, and had cause to be aggrieved. Certainly she had been going to bed with Bill whenever he seemed to expect it, which hadn't been very often, because there was no reasonable excuse she could make for refusing his attentions. She was married to him, wasn't she? She had even found some pleasure in his lovemaking at times, although she tried to be passive in his armsa whore's trick, she thought in quick self-contempt.
After all, it was Bake's fault. Bake's caresses had stirred and wakened her, taught her what passion could be. She had even thought, furtively and guiltily, how wonderful it would be if Bill would do what Bake did, and thenNow, remembering this afternoon, she hated herself and him.
"Never again," she said aloud.
"Never again what?"
"I'll never go to bed with him again."
"I've heard that before."
"No, I mean it."
"Then you're not even an honest whore. You're nothing but an unpaid housekeeper."
"Maybe I am."
Dressed, she went back into the bedroom, got her coat down off a hanger and put it on. The simple act seemed to push her back into the everyday world where her love for Bake was a guilty and exciting secret.
She asked suddenly, "What will you do all day?"
"Go out with some of the girls, probably."
And get a nice edge on, probably, Frances thought, but she managed not to say it. She leaned forward to fix her mouth, squinting a little because the light above the mirror was dim. "Oh, how pretty.”
Bake asked sharply, "What?"
<
br /> "The locket, here on the dresser." She picked it up, delighted with the design. "Is it new?”
"More or less."
She opened it carefully. The snapshot inside was small but clear. The color drained from her face. "Oh."
Bake turned her face away.
"You've been seeing Jane."
"Of course I have. We're old friends."
"She gave you this, didn't she?"
"Any reason she shouldn't?"
No reason, Frances thought quickly. Except that I didn't give you a Christmas present this year, or you me. Except that I was sitting home with a broken heart. Except that a gold locket with a picture in it isn't the gift of any casual acquaintance. She laid the bit of jewelry down carefully, as though it might shatter.
"It's not my kind of thing," Bake said. She put her arms around Frances, heavy coat and all. "Other people don't make any difference to us, you know that."
"I know."
But she felt chilled and a little frightened as she tiptoed down the stairs and let herself out into the pitch dark of the December midnight.
CHAPTER 18
Frances got up from the unmade davenport at six o'clock, after four hours of tossing and rolling and trying to find a path through the tangle of problems that was her immediate future. Darkness still pressed against the windows, and the house next door was a black hulk. She stood leaning against the wall, knowing that last night's dishes waited to be washed, but held immobile in a fatigue almost too heavy to bear. If you're going to be a hausfrau, she told herself crossly, you might as well be a good one. God knows you're no good at anything else.
She was having her third cup of coffee, standing, because to sit down would have been to invite sleep, when Bill came downstairs. For a moment she was too surprised to remember her grievance. "For heaven's sake, it isn't even seven o'clock. Don't tell me you have to go to the office on Christmas."
He blinked drowsily, without answering. She filled another cup and politely handed it to him. He took it and sat down on the step stool. "You didn't come to bed," he said hoarsely.
"I slept down here."
"That wasn't necessary."
"Wasn't it?"
He looked at her with hurt eyes. "I'm sorry about yesterday. That was a stinking thing to do."
"It doesn't matter."
"Try and look at it from my angle for once, will you? Living with you hasn't been any bed of roses lately."
"I said it doesn't matter." She was pleased with herself, her voice was so cold and even. She turned her back on him and began running water into the sink.
He sat looking at her, not knowing what to say. She ignored him. After a few minutes he got up and went into the living room, carrying his cup. She heard him stacking newspapers; then the nasal whine of the vacuum cleaner began. Let him help, she thought. Let him be a Boy Scout and do a good deed every day. It won't get him anywhere.
There was a harsh solace in physical work. As after her mother's death, she found a grim satisfaction and a numbing of mental stress in the aching back and the feeling of urgency that carried her along. By eleven the whole house was in order for guests, even to the hanging of small silly towels in the bathroom. Pies were cooling on the dinette table and the smell of roasting turkey filled the house. Hausfrau, she thought scornfully, wishing in the same breath that she had a real dining room; this eating on card tables was all right for ordinary days, but it would be fun on holidays to have a long dining table and put a white damask cloth on it. The girl from Frisbie, trying to get up in the world.
She went upstairs to change her dress and run a comb through her hair, noting as she lifted her arm that there was a small bruise just above the elbow. Lust or devotion? She didn't know; there was no way to tell. Probably bumped into something, she told herself sensibly.
Her reflection looked back from the dressing-table mirror, a slender woman with soft brown hair and gray eyes, the brows narrow and winged. She was thinner than she had been two years before, and better groomed; harder, more polished, her mouth a tighter line. Not the sort you suspect of leading a double life. She threw down her pearl button earrings and picked up the copper hoops Bake had given her, but they dangled incongruously against the white collar of her plain wool dress.
She tried not to think about Bake. Don't wonder who's with her. Or what they're doing.
She still had not spoken to Bill when Bob and Mari came in, Bob excited and breathless, Mari calm and pretty. "We went for a walk to get an appetite," Bob said, taking Mari's coat with an air of ownership.
"As if he needed any more appetite," Mari said. "It was nice of you to ask me, Mrs. Ollenfield."
"It was nice of you to come."
The sight of this girl twisted a knife in her heart. Mari was so pretty, soso exactly right. At the sight of her, the years of wifehood and motherhood rolled away from Frances, and she became again little Frankie Kirby in the outgrown cotton dress, with the skinny arms and legs. This was the kind of girl who had looked at her in the corridors of County High, not meanly but like a citizen of another world who could have nothing in common with such a tacky and squalid creature. This was the kind of girl she would have chosen to be, had she been given a choice. She said curtly, "Put her coat on a hanger, Bob."
She had to admit that Bill was a good host, probably because of the same qualities that made him a good sales manager. He was affable, he got everyone seated around the card tables (two of them for four diners, because there was so much food) and he watched the plates to be sure everyone was getting enough to eat. With Bob's girl he was at once teasing and flattering, a middle-aged man talking to an attractive teen-ager, and she was demure with him.
When the Flanagans showed up early, having been invited in for the afternoon, he seemed honestly pleased. "Sooner the better. How about a piece of pie?"
It can't be easy, Frances thought, moved to reluctant admiration. It can't be easy to keep up that kind of front when you're tired or worriedor when your wife is bitchy. She looked at him with unwilling sympathy. Then she recollected that she, not he, was the aggrieved one, and resumed her impassive expression before filling his cup.
Only Betty Flanagan's sharp look made her ask him politely, "More pie?"
He said, "Don't mind if I do. I hate to brag, Jack, but my wife makes the best pie you ever ate."
"In that case I’ll have a big piece."
She had to admit that Bill was showing up well, considering what he had been through in the last few hours. Whatever he might lack, it wasn't courage.
And what about me?
An early dusk was setting in before she could stack the dishes and carry them to the kitchen. Bill made drinks, pulled the shades, turned on the television. I wish I had a drink, Frances thought. A real drink, enough to relax me. Since she had started out with the Flanagans as a total abstainer, she didn't want to invite comment from them now. She thought longingly of the bottles in the top of the cupboard. Maybe a quick one while I'm doing the dishes.
She refused help with the washing up. "I'll stack them." But when she had gotten out the canasta cards and made fresh coffee, Mari followed her into the kitchen. "I'm going to help," she said in her small, composed voice.
"Oh, you don't have to help."
"I will, though."
Frances looked at her. The girl had hardly spoken since her arrival. She had sat listening to Bob and Bill, laughing at their jokes, eating daintily but with a good appetite.
Frances said, "I'm so glad you could come."
"It was awfully kind of you to ask me."
"Oh, Bob's always having girls here." That'll fix her.
Mari smiled. "I'm always taking boys home, too. But this is different."
Frances turned her face away. "How different?" she asked when she could trust her voice.
"Bob thinks he's in love with me."
"Is he?"
"Maybe." Mari hung a cup on its hook. The unspoken question hung in the air between them. After a moment of sil
ence she answered it. "I'm not sure about myself, though. I don't want to hurry things. Marriage is so permanent."
"Not always."
"It will be for me. Not because of my religion or anything. But my parents would be miserable if I ever got a divorce. My father's a judge, you knowhe's very conservative. But that's not why." Mari hesitated, looking uncertain for the first time in Frances' short knowledge of her. "I want everything to be right."
This was a girl who wouldn't do anything on impulse. She would select a husband carefully, taking into account family backgrounds and religion and her husband's career. They taught all this in school now, Frances knew. Mari's children would be carefully spaced and well brought up, her house spotless; she would be president of the PTA and chairman of the women's culture club. She might hold a job before her babies were born or after they began to grow up, an inter-sting and well-paid one. A pang for her own hungry, fumbling early years struck Frances' heart, and a regret for the child Bob had been and would never be again.
She said carefully, "You're probably right.”
She was conscious again of the small purple bruise above her elbow, and for the second time she wondered whether it had been inflicted by the husband she had come to hate and was beginning to feel sorry for, or by the woman she loved and was beginning to distrust.
She averted her eyes from Mari, feeling guilty.
Mari would never have such a problem. Things would be clear and definite for her. Frances liked her, envied her, and wondered once again: suppose I'd been like that, had that sort of start in life, would things have turned out differently?
The phone rang around eight, while she was making cold turkey sandwiches and thinking, don't these people ever do anything but eat? Bob took it. "For you, Mom." He laid the instrument down and stepped aside, looking at her warily and, she thought, pleadingly.
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