“What? No, no,” Jeremy said, “please, I don’t want it, take it back with you.” Then he was ashamed of his rudeness, and he blushed and looked up at her. In the summertime, stripped of her lavender cardigan, her bony freckled arms gave her a vulnerable look. White strings stood out along the inside of her wrist when she turned the faucet off. “But I’m grateful to you for bringing the book,” Jeremy said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“Oh, that’s all right, I never much liked him myself.”
She turned, cheerful as ever, to hang up her dishtowel and take her purse from the table. Meanwhile Mrs. Jarrett ate fruit cup in the dining room, the ladylike clink of her spoon sounding at perfectly spaced intervals. Mr. Somerset put his skillet down silently and gravely, making certain that it sat in the exact center of the circle of the burner, ready to be used at another meal. Was there anyone gentler than old people? Could he ever feel as much at rest as he did sitting in this triangle of muted gray voices?
Then here came the second shift, as if in answer — Darcy slamming the door and pounding down the hallway with a bucket full of dandelions, Mary laughing and calling out warnings and threats and promises, and maybe if it were a weekend Howard’s high-pitched whistle and the squeak of his sneakers. “Where’s the milk I left here?” “Who wants a dandelion?” “You’re going to bump into someone, Darcy!”—which Darcy would almost surely do, as if she had to depend on someone else to break her speed for her. Flunf! into Miss Vinton’s middle. “Oh, Darcy, say you’re sorry.” “No harm done,” said Miss Vinton, and Darcy spun on through the kitchen, ending up with her arms around Howard. “Howard, make me flapjacks, Howard.” “Let him be, Darcy.” “Oh now,” Howard said to Mary, “you’re just jealous because I won’t make you flapjacks.” Then the kitchen splintered into bits of laughter, and Miss Vinton smiled and left while Mr. Somerset turned slowly from the stove, dazed by the laughter, baffled by frivolity. “What?” he said. Mary folded Darcy into the circle of her arms and said, “Milk or apple juice, young lady?” “Both,” said Darcy. “Or wait. Is apple juice what I want?” She turned toward Jeremy as if she expected him to answer, but Jeremy was looking at Mary. He saw the curve of her cheek against Darcy’s tow hair; he noticed how her nearly unarched eyebrows calmed and rested him.
Why hadn’t he been granted the one thing in life he ever hoped for?
At the beginning of September, Darcy started kindergarten and Mary found a job. It was something she could do at home: making argyle socks on a knitting machine. In the morning while Darcy was at school Mary worked alone in her room, but Darcy returned at lunchtime and was in and out all the rest of the day, leaving the door open behind her, and the sock machine soon became part of the household. It consisted of a circle of vertical needles, which first had to be threaded one by one. Threading was the time-consuming part. Then Mary cranked a large handle a prescribed number of times, after which she paused to rethread in another color. Jeremy, passing her doorway, had a glimpse of her huddled in a C-shape and frowning at metal eyes that seemed far too close together. She reminded him of old photographs of life in a sweatshop. But when the threading was done she could straighten up and stand back, and the cranking was so easy that sometimes she let Darcy do it while she herself counted the strokes. Numbers rang out and floated through the house—“Thirty-six! Thirty-seven!” After the tense silence of the threading, her voice and the circular rattle of machinery seemed like an outburst of joy. Wherever he was, Jeremy would raise his head to listen, and he noticed that the whole house appeared to relax at those times and the other boarders grew suddenly talkative, as if they too had held tense during the threading.
At the end of her first week of work, Mary packed the completed socks in a cardboard carton. She left Darcy with Mrs. Jarrett and caught a bus to the factory, where she was supposed to deliver them. “Why can’t I come too?” Darcy asked. “Because it wouldn’t be any fun,” Mrs. Jarrett told her. “The place where Mommy is going is the factory section, all nasty and dirty.” Jeremy felt something shrink in him. As if her absence were one long threading period, he held himself rigid in a parlor chair, scarcely breathing, silently turning the pages of a book of old masters that his mother had given him. “Goodness, don’t you have anything to do?” Mrs. Jarrett asked once. “I thought Saturday your students came.” Jeremy looked up, still turning pages. He had lost his last student a month ago and no others had called yet, but before he could put all this into words his thoughts trailed off again and he forgot to answer.
Mary returned just before lunch, bringing a new carton of yarn. When Darcy heard she came running out of the kitchen with Mrs. Jarrett close behind, and Jeremy stood up holding his book to his stomach. He thought that now the shrunken feeling would leave him, but it didn’t. Mary’s face was gray and her shoulders sagged. “How’s our career woman?” Mrs. Jarrett asked, clapping her hands together.
“Oh well, I’m all right.”
“You seem a little tired.”
“I had to wait in line a while,” Mary said. “There are a lot of other people doing this work.”
“Is that right? And just think, I never even heard of it before. Did you meet anybody interesting?”
“Oh, trash mostly. Just, you know. Just trash.” She set her carton on the coffee table and sat down. “I didn’t make as much money as I thought I would,” she said.
“Now be sure they pay you what they owe, you hear?”
Jeremy, back in his armchair now, kept nodding his head to show that he agreed. He felt as tired and sad as Mary. He wanted to offer her something — a cup of coffee? She didn’t drink coffee. In his mother’s old books a rich gentleman would come now to rescue Mary from life in the sweatshop, but Jeremy was the only gentleman present and he wasn’t rich and he didn’t believe that Mary had even noticed he was in the room. She spoke solely to Mrs. Jarrett. She said, “Oh, they paid me what they owed. But I had made a few mistakes, and also I’m still slow. Some of these people just whip them out by the dozen, but I don’t. I don’t know why. I thought I was going so fast. I thought I could make up the rent and the grocery and Darcy’s school clothes, all in just a few hours a day.”
“Now, now,” said Mrs. Jarrett. “Give yourself time.”
Jeremy went on nodding. He kept his eyes fixed on the label at the end of the yarn box — a rectangle of glaring yellow, a color he had always disliked. The brightness of it made his eyes ache. He imagined himself winning twenty-five thousand dollars from some soap company and offering it to her, watching her brow slowly smooth and lighten as she looked down and saw what he had put into her hands. “No, no,” he would tell her, “no strings. You don’t even have to be my friend, just please don’t thread those needles any more …” Yet if she had that much money, wouldn’t she leave him?