They had helped him pick up the plastic bags strewn all over the street. “What are these?” Tib had said, stooping because she couldn’t bend over in her straight blue skirt and high heels.
“Tupperware,” he said. “The latest thing. You girls wouldn’t need a lettuce crisper, would you? They’re great for keeping worms in.”
Carter Hall looked just the same from the outside, ugly beige stone and glass brick. It had been the student union, but now it housed Financial Aid and Personnel. Inside it had been completely remodeled. Elizabeth couldn’t even tell where the cafeteria had been.
“You can fill it out here if you want,” the girl who gave her the application said, and gave her a pen. Elizabeth hung her coat over the back of a chair and sat down at a desk by a window. It felt chilly, though the window was steamy.
They had all gone to the student union for pizza. Elizabeth had hung her yellow slicker over the back of the booth. Tupper had pretended to wring out his jean jacket and draped it over the radiator. The window by the booth was so steamed up, they couldn’t see out. Tib had written “I hate rain” on the window with her finger, and Tupper had told them how he was putting himself through college selling Tupperware.
“They’re great for keeping cookies in,” he said, hauling up a big pink box he called a cereal keeper. He put a piece of pizza inside and showed them how to put the lid on and burp it. “There. It’ll keep for weeks. Years. Come on. You need one. I’ll bet your mothers send you cookies all the time.”
He was a junior. He was tall and skinny, and when he put his damp jean jacket back on, the sleeves were too short, and his wrists stuck out. He had sat next to Tib on one side of the booth and Elizabeth had sat on the other. He had talked to Tib most of the evening, and when he was paying the check, he had bent toward Tib and whispered something to her. Elizabeth was sure he was asking her out on a date, but on the way home Tib had said, “You know what he wanted, don’t you? Your telephone number.”
Elizabeth stood up and put her coat back on. She gave the girl in the sweater and skirt back her pen. “I think I’ll fill this out at home and bring it back.”
“Sure,” the girl said.
When Elizabeth went back outside, the rain had stopped. The trees were still dripping, big drops that splattered onto the wet walk. She walked up the wide center walk toward her old dorm, looking at her feet so she wouldn’t step on any worms. The dorm had been converted into the university’s infirmary. She stopped and stood a minute under the center window, looking up at the room that had been hers and Tib’s.
Tupper had stood under the window and thrown pebbles up at it. Tib had opened the window and yelled, “You’d better stop throwing rocks, you …” Something hit her in the chest. “Oh, hi, Tupper,” she said, and picked it up off the floor and handed it to Elizabeth. “It’s for you,” she said. It wasn’t a pebble. It was a pink plastic gadget, one of the favors he passed out at his Tupperware parties.
“What’s this supposed to be?” Elizabeth had said, leaning out of the window and waving it at him. It was raining. Tupper had the collar of his jean jacket turned up and he looked cold. The sidewalk around him was covered with pink plastic favors.
“A present,” he said. “It’s an egg separator.”
“I don’t have any eggs.”
“Wear it around your neck then. We’ll be officially scrambled.”
“Or separated.”
He grabbed at his chest with his free hand. “Never!” he said. “Want to come out in the worms with me? I’ve got some deliveries to make.” He held up a clutch of plastic bags full of bowls and cereal keepers.
“I’ll be right down,” she had said, but she had stopped and found a ribbon to string the egg separator on before she went downstairs.
Elizabeth looked down at the sidewalk, but there were no plastic favors on the wet cement. There was a big puddle out by the curb, and a worm lay at the edge of it. It moved a little as she watched, in that horrid boneless way that she had always hated, and then lay still.
A girl brushed past her, walking fast. She stepped in the puddle, and Elizabeth took a half step back to avoid being splashed. The water in the puddle rippled and moved out in a wave. The worm went over the edge of the sidewalk and into the gutter.
Elizabeth looked up. The girl was already halfway down the center walk, late for class or angry or both. She was wearing an Angel Flight uniform and high heels, and her short blond hair was brushed back in wings along the sides of her garrison cap.
Elizabeth stepped off the curb into the street. The gutter was clogged with dead leaves and full of water. The worm lay at the bottom. She sat down on her heels, holding the application form in her right hand. The worm would drown, wouldn’t it? That was what Tupper had told her. The reason they came out on the sidewalks when it rained was that their tunnels filled up with water, and they would drown if they didn’t.
She stood up and looked down the central walk again, but the girl was gone, and there was nobody else on the campus. She stooped again and transferred the application to her other hand, and then reached in the icy water, and scooped up the worm in her cupped hand, thinking that as long as it didn’t move she would be able to stand it, but as soon as her fingers touched the soft pink flesh, she dropped it and clenched her fist.
“I can’t,” Elizabeth said, rubbing her wet hand along the side of her raincoat, as if she could wipe off the memory of the worm’s touch.
She took the application in both hands and dipped it into the water like a scoop. The paper went a little limp in the water, but she pushed it into the dirty, wet leaves and scooped the worm up and put it back on the sidewalk. It didn’t move.
“And thank God they do come out on the sidewalks!” Tupper had said, walking her home in the middle of the street from his Tupperware deliveries. “You think they’re disgusting lying there! What if they didn’t come out on the sidewalks? What if they all stayed in their holes and drowned? Have you ever had to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a worm?”
Elizabeth straightened up. The job application was wet and dirty. There was a brown smear where the worm had lain, and a dirty line across the top. She should throw it away and go back to Carter to get another one. She unfolded it and carefully separated the wet pages so they wouldn’t stick together as they dried.
“I had first aid last semester, and we had to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in there,” Tupper had said, standing in the middle of the street in front of her dorm. “What a great class! I sold twenty-two square rounds for snake-bite kits. Do you know how to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?”
“No.”
“It’s easy,” Tupper had said, and put his hand on the back of her neck under her hair and kissed her, in the middle of the street in the rain.
The worm still hadn’t moved. Elizabeth stood and watched it a little longer, feeling cold, and then went out in the middle of the street and walked home.
Paul didn’t come home until after seven. Elizabeth had kept a casserole warm in the oven.
“I ate,” he said. “I thought you’d be at your Tupperware party.”
“I don’t want to go,” she said, reaching into the hot oven to get the casserole out. It was the first time she had felt warm all day.
“Brubaker’s wife is going. I told him you’d be there, too. I want you to get to know her. Brubaker’s got a lot of influence around here about who gets tenure.”
She put the casserole on top of the stove and then stood there with the oven door half-open. “I went over to apply for a job today,” she said, “and I saw this worm. It had fallen in the gutter and it was drowning and I picked it up and put it back on the sidewalk.”