“Just when I think I know where I am, I get a bill for a couple of hundred dollars for the insurance on the car, or the hospitalization on me and the kids. Or, like last month, seventy-eight dollars to get the oil burner fixed. Forty dollars on Kit’s teeth.
“Mitch was making eighteen thousand. That’s fifteen hundred a month, about eleven hundred after they took out the deductions. And we couldn’t seem to save anything, Cal. We used to talk about it sometimes, and worry about it, and feel like grasshoppers instead of diligent ants. We weren’t ever in a hole, but we were never more than even.
“It’s like the house. We were living up to what we expected the future would be. Mitch had to live pretty well, you know. They sort of expected it of him. Whenever he’d get a raise, we’d think we were going to be able to get ahead of the game. But there was always something coming along to use it up.
“Our friends are the same way, only worse. Some of them are really in the hole. It’s a funny way to live, I guess. And you don’t realize it until... the money stops.
“I wake up in the middle of the night and wonder what I’m going to do. I can get along like this by being real careful. But I won’t be able to educate the kids. That would be a shameful thing, Cal. I want to be reliable. I have to make some kind of a move sooner or later. I just don’t know when or how.”
“It isn’t all that urgent, is it?”
“Not really, I guess. But I don’t want to get too used to not facing it. I have to watch myself. I could turn into a slob in the twinkling of an eye.”
“Would this house sell without much trouble?”
“Oh, yes. I could probably get thirty-five. Bill thinks I could. It would solve a lot of problems, I suppose. That money, invested, would give me about a hundred and forty dollars a month. There’d be enough extra so I could take out education policies on the kids.”
“But the problem is, I suppose, where would you go?”
“Don’t you have some nice easy answer? Everybody else does.”
He shook his head slowly. “No easy answers to that one, Lollie. Not when you’ve got your roots in this town, in this section of town. No relatives you can go move in on, yours or Mitch’s. So what do you do? Take an apartment in the city? Try to find one with three bedrooms you’d like and could afford. Buy a nice new little tract house? Where you’d probably be the only woman alone in the whole development? I can’t see that working out too well, one of the best reasons being you’re a very handsome gal.”
“Thank you, sir. I know it’s a trite and tiresome story, but I’ve noted just a little bit of wariness on the part of the married females I’ve known for years. They know I’m not predatory. I guess it’s sort of an instinct. Cal, you’re the first person who’s understood this problem of pulling up stakes. It isn’t as simple as people think. I guess I should have known you’d be able to understand.”
“Most people like neat solutions. There aren’t any, usually.”
“I could see Bill and that insurance agent working out one of those neat solutions. The agent came right out with it. ‘If you marry again,’ he said. He wanted to say when instead of if. He said I could then set aside the life income money for the education of my children. But they wanted it all neatened up.”
“How do you feel about remarriage?”
Laura shrugged. “I think about it sometimes. I guess because I’m supposed to think about it. I’m thirty-two. But it seems the most implausible thing in the world, Cal. I accept the fact it’s within the realm of possibility I might meet a man some day and fall in love with him. But I can’t imagine it. I’m a one-man gal. Mitch was that man. Anybody else is... inconceivable. So, with that ruled out, it brings up another point. I can’t spend my life housekeeping for my kids. With Mitch gone, there’s less point in the home-and-hearth routine. I don’t want to live my life just taking care of them. It would be an unhealthy thing for me and for them. I have to have something to do. But that’s a pretty problem too. Liberal arts at Bennington, and eleven years of marriage. I’m not a career type. I’m a wife type.”
“And committeewoman?”
She scowled at him. “Darn you, Cal, that’s been part of being a wife in this sort of marriage. The executive wife, I suppose. But not, I should hope, pushy about it. There’re things I’ve done that’ve helped Mitch. Fund drives, League of Women Voters, PTA, Art Center. Why shouldn’t I have used surplus energy that way? A lot of it is fun and it helped Mitch, indirectly. A lot of clever men have had a lot of fun writing snide things about suburbia. But while Mitch was living and working, there was good reason for it. Now the basic reason is gone, sure. And it seems empty and more than a little bit silly, but I’ve gradually gotten back into all that stuff and I keep on doing it because the only other choice is to keep hiding in the house while the kids are at school.”
“Or find a job.”
“I knew we’d get around to that. Doing what? Sales lady, hostess in a restaurant, waitress? I don’t want the kids coming home to an empty house. That’s part of my job too. If I hire somebody to look after them, I end up with a net of how much per week? Ten dollars, maybe? What kind of job has the same hours as school?”
“You’ve got time, Lollie. Time to make decisions.”
“Oh, yes indeed,” she said ruefully. “All the time in the world. Funny thing. I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I was doing it. So was Mitch. We were going to rassle our way through the adolescent thing and the college thing, and try to make good people out of the kids. Then, way ahead some place, there were the, like they say, sunset years, a comfortable elderly couple. Cal, it’s like buying a ticket all the way through, and then they let you off in some crummy little town where you don’t know anybody and you don’t want to be. And you know, sometimes when I’m tired, I resent my poor darling. He deserted me, and left me all the responsibilities, all the planning and wondering, everything to do alone. That’s a terrible way to feel, isn’t it?”
“Understandable, Lollie.”
She had her elbows on the table, her jaw propped on her fists. She was more striking than pretty, with gold-brown hair, small nose, a faint pattern of freckles, a slight suburban weathering of forehead and the corners of her eyes. Her mouth was level and ripe and controlled, and her eyes were large, gray-green, looking at him with a forlorn derision, a vulnerable knowing of self.
She frowned and said, “What happens, I guess, you begin to question too many things. There isn’t as much point in things. This kind of life... it was working. But now, the things I do, it’s kind of empty, an empty way of life. I know if you peel any human activity right down to any ultimate meaning, it’s hard to find much sense in it. But these days there seems to be a lot less sense than usual. He should have left me millions. I could devote myself to good works and feel noble as anything. Cal, dear, I don’t want to inflict any kind of... spiritual torment on you, but what kind of response should I have to a world which could take Mitch away from us?”
“Looking for reasons won’t get you anywhere.”
“I know that. Everybody dies. I tell myself I made the good years good, but I could have made them better, maybe, if I’d known. In a way, I’m glad we lost that baby that time. I was such an utter trusting idiot up until then. The world just couldn’t do such a nasty sneaky thing to Laura Barnes. It wasn’t fair. But I got over it and it gave me some armor, I guess. It left me a little better prepared to... to handle this. I was like a puppy, prancing and smirking up to a big dog, whining with pleasure, and getting one hell of a painful bite. So maybe I grew up from that point, knowing I could be bitten again.”