“Sure. Why not? It’s my last stop.”
She asked if he wanted something to eat, and got him some crackers and cheese. “I’m always hungry,” he said.
She brought the baby into the kitchen and they all three sat at the table while he ate and drank. Stuffing his mouth with cheese, he seemed to be a child. His gaze was clear and disarming. She couldn’t meet it without a stir in her blood. And was this sluttishness? Was she worse than Mrs. Lockhart? Would she be dragged figuratively out of Proxmire Manor at the tail of a cart? She didn’t care.
“Nobody ever gave me a beer before,” he said. “They give me Cokes, sometimes. I guess they don’t think I’m old enough. But I drink. Martinis, whisky, everything.”
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen. Now I have to go.”
“Please don’t go,” she said.
He stood at the table, covering her with his wide gaze, and she wondered what would happen if she reached out to him. Would he run out of the kitchen? Would he shout, “Unhand me!”? He seemed ripe; he seemed ready for the picking; and yet there was something else in the corner of his eyes—reserve, wariness. He perhaps had a vision of something better, and if he had, she would encourage him with all her heart. Go and love the drum majorette, the girl next door.
“Oh, I’d like to stay,” he said. “It’s nice here. But it’s Thursday, and I have to take my mother shopping. Thank you very much.”
He went to the house three or four times a week. Melissa was usually alone in the late afternoons and he timed his visits. Sometimes she seemed to be waiting for him. No one had ever been so attentive. She seemed interested in all the facts of his life—that his father had been a surveyor, that he drove a secondhand Buick, that he had done well at school. She usually gave him a beer and sat with him in the kitchen. Her company excited him. It made him feel that he might do well. Some of her worldliness, some of her finesse, would rub off on him and get him out of the grocery business. Suddenly, one afternoon, she said quite shyly, “You know, you’re divine.”
He wondered if she hadn’t lost her marbles. He had heard that women sometimes did. Had he been wasting his time? He didn’t want to fool around with a woman who had lost her marbles. He knew he wasn’t divine. If he was, someone would have said so before and if he had been divine and had been convinced of this, he would have concealed it—not through modesty but through an instinct of self-preservation. “Sometimes I think I’m good-looking,” he said earnestly to try and modify her praise. He finished his beer. “Now I have to get back to the store.”
Chapter XI
Melissa went shopping in New York a few days later. She stood on the platform with her neighbor, Gertrude Bender, waiting for the midmorning train. As the train came around the curve the station agent pushed out on a wagon one of those yellow wooden boxes that are used for transporting coffins. This simple fact of life came as a blow to Melissa’s high spirits. “It must be Gertrude Lockhart,” her friend whispered. “They’re sending her back to Indiana.”
“I didn’t know she was dead,” Melissa said.
“She hung herself in the garage,” her friend said, still whispering, and they boarded the train.
Now it was not true that nothing happened in Proxmire Manor; the truth was that eventfulness in the community took such eccentric curves that it was difficult to comprehend. It was not a force of discreetness that kept Melissa from knowing Gertrude Lockhart’s story; it was that the story was more easily forgotten than understood. She had been, considering her widespread reputation for licentiousness, a singularly winsome woman; light-boned, quick, a little nervous. Her skin was very white. This was not a point of beauty, a stirring pallor. She just happened to have a white skin. Her hair was ash-blond but it had lost its shine. Her eyes were bright, small, dark and set close together. Her ears were too big, a fact that made her seem basically unserious. At the fourth- or fifth-string boarding school she had attended she had been known as Dirty Gertie. She was married, happily enough, to Pete Lockhart and had three small children. Her downfall began not with immortal longings but with an uncommonly severe winter when the main soil line from their house to the septic tank froze. The toilets backed up into the bathtubs and sinks. Nothing drained. Her husband went off to work. Her children caught the school bus. At half-past eight she found herself alone in a house that had, in a sense, ceased to function. The place was not luxurious but it appeared to be civilized; it appeared to promise something better than relieving herself in a bucket. At nine o’clock she took a drink of whisky and began to call the plumbers of Parthenia. There were seven and they were all busy. She kept repeating that her case was an emergency. One firm offered, as a favor, to stir up for her a retired plumber and presently an old man in an old car came to the house. He looked sadly at the mess in the bathtubs and the sinks and told her that he was a plumber, not a ditchdigger, and that she would have to find someone to dig a trench before he could repair the drain. She had another drink, put on some lipstick and drove into Parthenia.
She went first to the state employment office where eighteen or twenty men were sitting around looking for work but none of them was willing to dig a ditch and she saw as one of the facts of her life, her time, that standards of self-esteem had advanced to a point where no one was able to dig a hole. She went to the liquor store to get some whisky and told the clerk her problems. He said he thought he could get someone to help. He made a telephone call. “I’ve got you somebody,” he said. “He’s not as bad as he sounds. Give him two dollars an hour and all the whisky he can drink. His father-in-law fired him out of the house a couple of weeks ago and he’s on the bum, but he’s a nice guy.” She went home and had another drink. Sometime later the doorbell rang. She had expected an old man with the shakes but what she saw was a man in his thirties. He wore tight jeans and a dark pullover and stood on her steps with his hands thrust into his back pockets, his chest pushed forward in a curious way as if this were a gesture of pride, friendship or courtship. His skin was dark, rucked deeply around the mouth like the seams on a boot, and his eyes were brown. His smile was bare amorousness. It was his only smile, but she didn’t know this. He would smile amorously at his shovel, amorously into his whisky glass, amorously into the hole he had dug, and when it was time to go home he would smile amorously at the ignition switch on his car. She offered him some whisky but he said he would wait. She showed him where the tools were and he began to dig.
He worked for two hours and uncovered and cleared the frozen drain. She was able to clear out the bathtubs and sinks. When he returned the tools she asked him in for his whisky. She was quite drunk herself by then. He poured himself a water glass of whisky and drank it off. “What I really need,” he said, “is a shower. I’m living in a furnished room. You have to take turns at the bathtub.” She said he could take a shower, knowing full well what was afoot. He drank off another glass of whisky and she led him upstairs and opened the bathroom door. “I’ll just get out of these things,” he said, pulling off his sweater and dropping his jeans.
They were still in bed when the children came home. She opened the door and called sweetly down the stairs: “Mummy’s resting. There are cookies on top of the icebox. Be sure and take your vitamin pills before you go out to play.” When the children went out she gave him ten dollars, kissed him good-bye and slipped him out the back door. She never saw him again.
The old plumber fixed the drain and on the weekend Pete filled in the trench. The weather remained bitter. One morning, a week or ten days later, she was wakened by her husband’s huffing and puffing. “There isn’t time, darling,” she said. She slipped on a wrapper, went downstairs and tried to open a package of bacon. The package promised to seal in the bacon’s smoky flavor but she couldn’t get the package open. She broke a fingernail. The transparent wrapper that imprisoned the bacon seemed like some immutable transparency in her life, some invisible barrier of frustrations that stood between herself and what she deserved. Pete joined her while she was struggling with the bacon and continued his attack. He was very nearly successful—he had her backed up against the gas range—when they heard the thunder of their children’s footsteps in the hall. Pete went off to the train with mixed and turbulent feelings. She got the children some breakfast and watched them eat it with the extraordinary density of a family gathered at a kitchen table on a dark winter morning. When the children had gone off to get the school bus she turned up the thermostat. There was a dull explosion from the furnace room. A cloud of rank smoke came out the cellar door. She poured herself a glass of whisky to steady her nerves and opened the door. The room was full of smoke but there was no fire. Then she telephoned the oil-burner repairman they employed. “Oh, Charlie isn’t here,” his wife said brightly. “He’s up in Utica with his bowling team. They’re in the semi-finals. He won’t be back for ten days.” She called every oil-burner man in the telephone directory but none of them was free. “But someone must come and help me,” she exclaimed to one of the women who answered the phone. “It’s zero outside and there’s no heat at all. Everything will freeze.” “Well, I’m sorry but I won’t have a man free until Thursday,” the stranger said. “But why don’t you buy yourself an electric heater? You can keep the temperature up with those things.” She had some more whisky, put on some lipstick and drove to the hardware store in Parthenia where she bought a large electric heater. She plugged it into an outlet in the kitchen and pulled the switch. All the lights in the house went out and she poured herself some more whisky and began to cry.