Puttering About In a Small Land, page 7
“I don’t have to go to California,” he told her.
“No,” she said, “I guess not.”
“I could stay here. Any big city there’s going to be a lot of television . . . like New York for instance. But these guys out on the Coast expect me. They’re counting on it.”
“Then you better go,” she said.
He studied her for a long time.
“I mean,” she said, “if that’s what you told them. That you were coming.”
At that, he put on such a circumspect expression that she knew he was really very smart; he had been shy, a little uncertain of himself, and he had frisked about while he searched for what he wanted, whatever it was, something to do with her, but as time wore on he lost that, he got over the awkwardness; the kidding and the half-boasting, the nonsense, rushed by. He got rid of them. Now he was more like she remembered from the night of the party: quiet, moody, even somewhat despondent. But how clever he was. He could do almost anything. In the beginning she had felt helpless because he sat drinking up her wine, and now a tinge of that helplessness returned; on the bench beside her he seemed so resourceful, so experienced, and of course he was older than she. And she had no knowledge of him really; she could not really trust what she heard from him, or even what she saw. It was, she thought, as if he had complete control of himself. He could become anything he wanted.
Especially, she thought, he had an enduring quality. Something to do with time; she did not understand it at all.
A long view, perhaps.
“I got to get going,” he announced suddenly. Snapping his cigarette from him, into the wet grass, he stood up.
“Yes,” she” said, “but not right this minute.”
“I have a lot on my mind,” he said. But he remained where he was.
Virginia said, “Maybe you better go and get it done.”
“What about you?”
“Oh, go to hell,” she said.
“What!” he said, astonished.
Still seated, she said, “Go on. Go do what you have to do.” They had surprised each other and made each other angry. But for her part she knew she was right. She looked past him at an object out across the water, in the center of the Basin; she pretended to herself that it had moved and she followed its course as it bobbed up and down.
“You don’t have to get sore,” Roger said.
His composure came steadily back, and again she thought that he needed only time. In spite of his size—when they were both standing he was an inch or so shorter than she—he managed to keep her respect; in the past she had regarded small men as ridiculous to some extent, their strutting and posing, their rituals of pride, but that was not so here, that was not the case with him. His resilience impressed her. And, while she still gazed out at the buoy on the water, Roger began to grin again.
5
A figure far off down the street reminded her of her daughter. A lank tall girl, wearing a coat, who marched so swiftly that her hair streamed behind her. And her hair had the ragged uncombedness of Virginia’s. At the curb the girl stepped without looking, the same plunging forward with her head up, with no thought of where she put her feet. It gave her an ungainly quality, as it gave Virginia; the girl did not have a feminine walk, nor grace, nor even good coordination. She did not seem to know what to do with her arms. But her legs were long and smooth—the short war-time skirts showed them up to the knees—and her back was quite straight. When she came trotting up onto the last block Mrs. Watson realized that it was Virginia. For heaven’s sake, had she come on the bus? Always in the past she had come with somebody in a car.
“I didn’t recognize you,” Mrs. Marion Watson said.
Virginia halted at the fence, flushed and breathing through her mouth, an asthmatic wheeze that seemed to rise out of good spirits rather than exertion. She made no move to open the gate and enter the yard; she seemed happy to remain on the sidewalk. After a pause Mrs. Watson resumed her work; she snapped off another growth from the tea-rose bush over which she crouched.
Virginia said cheerfully, “What are you doing? You’re cutting them down until they’re stumps; they look like sticks.”
“I didn’t expect to see you come walking up the street,” Mrs. Watson said. “I was looking for Carl’s car.” Carl was the boy who usually brought her daughter; they had been going together, off and on, for a year.
Opening the gate, Virginia ducked under the arbor of cabbage roses, brushing at the branches without paying attention to them. Something to get past, as it had been with her all her life. The swipe of her hand, the impatience . . . she came up beside her mother, stopped a moment, and then started onto the back stairs.
“I have to finish this,” Mrs. Watson said. “This is the time to prune them.” She continued snapping the branches; here and there is the yard she had left piles of them, and along the side of the house. “I’m almost done.”
On the steps Virginia surveyed the yard, swinging herself from side to side, her hands in the deep pockets of her coat. In the midday direct sunlight her face gleamed, lacking makeup, somewhat dry, but, her mother thought, pretty enough. A girl’s bright thin mouth, a few freckles on her cheeks, the sandy, shapeless hair. Skin and blouse of a college girl, the same low-heeled shoes—a pair of saddle shoes they had picked out together, on a shopping trip several years before.
Getting to her feet—her muscles ached from the gardening—Mrs. Watson said, “Now I want to rake them into the back so Paul can burn them.”
“Who’s Paul?”
“The colored man who comes around and does gardening and hauling.” From the garage she brought the rake and began to strike with it at the cut rose branches. “Don’t I sound like a Southern lady?” she said.
“I know you aren’t.”
She paused in her work. “I am. I wouldn’t be out here in this—” Gesturing at the yard she said, “Of course now it’s patriotic.”
Most of the ground had become a victory garden; beets and carrots and radishes waved their tops in rows. “But let’s face it.”
“I can’t stay too long today,” Virginia said. “I want to be back at the apartment by dinner time. Somebody might call.”
“The hospital?”
“No,” she said. “A friend who’s going to California.”
“How can she call if she’s going to California?”
“Well, if he doesn’t go then he’ll probably call.”
“Is it somebody I know?”
“No,” Virginia said. She opened the screen door and started on into the house. “He’s a friend of the Rattenfangers’. They had a party for me—”
“How did it turn out?” She had been told about the party; it celebrated Virginia’s first year at her job.
“Not bad. Mostly just sitting around talking. Everybody had to go to bed early to get up Saturday for work.”
“What sort of man is this person?” Once, in town, she had met the Rattenfangers at Virginia’s apartment. The two of them did not impress her as much as they impressed Virginia, but she did not mind them; at least they seemed genial, without claim to being anything other than they were.
Loitering on the steps Virginia said, “That’s hard to say. I don’t know. What kind of person is anybody? It depends on the circumstances a lot. Sometimes you’re in a different mood.”
“Well,” she said, “what’s he doing?” When her daughter did not answer she said, “Is he in the Service?”
“He’s discharged. He got wounded in the Philippines or something. Anyhow he’s on Federal disability. He seemed sort of nice. He’s probably in California by now. Or on the way.” She sounded glum. Next thing she had disappeared into the house, and the screen door closed behind her.
At the kitchen table the two of them sat rolling cigarettes on the odd little machine that Mrs. Watson had bought at People’s Drugstore. It turned paper and pipe tobacco—almost the only tobacco still available—into half-way decent cigarettes, preferable at least to the peculiar ten-cent brands that had shown up on store shelves, which tasted as if they had been swept from the floors of barns.
“That reminds me,” Virginia said. “In my purse I have some red stamps for you. Don’t let me forget them.”
“Can you spare them?” Her delight rang in her voice.
“Sure. I’m eating lunch at work. If the butcher asks why they’re not attached to the book, say you got them for fat.”
“I hate to take yours,” Mrs. Watson said. “But I can certainly use them. Look, dear, I’ll buy a leg of lamb for next Sunday; you can come out and eat it.”
“Maybe so,” Virginia said, as if she were not really listening. Her attention had turned elsewhere and she sat mutely, stiff and in an awkward position, with her chair too far back from the table. It gave her a skinniness; her cheeks had become sunken and she stared down hollow-eyed, her bare arms resting on the table before her. As she worked the machine she drummed on the table; her fingers, so lean and unusually strong, beat on the wood until she noticed what she was doing and stopped.
“You look like hunger,” Mrs. Watson said, not pleased.
“Hungry? No—”
“Hunger. Somebody personifying the Axis concentration camps.”
Her daughter’s brow pulled together. “Don’t be silly.”
“I was merely teasing you.”
“No,” Virginia said, “it’s your way of making a suggestion.”
“You could use makeup,” Mrs. Watson said. “Or do something else with your hair. You’ve stopped putting it up, haven’t you?”
Virginia said, “I don’t have time for that. There’s a war on, you know.”
“Your hair is really a sight,” Mrs. Watson said. “If you go look in the mirror you’ll agree.”
“I know what I look like,” Virginia said.
A moment of silence.
“Well,” Mrs. Watson said, “I just don’t want to see you detract from your pretty appearance.”
Virginia said nothing. She resumed the making of cigarettes.
“Don’t take things so seriously,” Mrs. Watson said. “That’s one of your tendencies, and I know you know it.”
Virginia raised her head and gave her a hard glance.
“How is Carl?” Mrs. Watson said presently.
“Fine.”
“Why didn’t he drive you out?”
“Let’s talk about something else.” Her work slowed and she began to pick at bits of tobacco, catching them between her nails. For all its fierceness her energy had an early limit.
“He hasn’t been sent back overseas, has he?” Mrs. Watson said. Of the different boys she preferred Carl; he seemed always to be on his feet opening doors, shaking hands, half-bowing from his great height. “There’s so little stability during a war,” she said. “How long do you think it’ll last? I’ll be glad when it’s over.”
“They should be opening up the Second Front pretty soon,” Virginia said.
“Do you think so? Do you think the Russians can hold out? Of course, we’re getting so much Lend-Lease to them . . . but I’m surprised they lasted this long.” From the beginning she had been sure the Russians would give up; she still expected to turn on the radio and hear that they and the Germans had signed an agreement.
Virginia said, “You won’t agree with me, but I think the war is a good thing because of the changes it’s made. After it’s over the world will be so much better that it’ll make up for the war.”
Her mother groaned.
“Change is good,” Virginia said.
“I’ve seen enough change.” In 1932 she had voted for Hoover. The first months of the Roosevelt Administration had horrified her. Her husband had passed on at about the same time, and in her mind the two events mingled, death and loss with the overturning of the order, N.R.A. stickers and, in the streets, the W.P.A. signs. “Wait until you get as old as I am,” she said.
“Does it bother you not to know where we’ll be a year from now? Why does it bother you? It’s wonderful. . . that’s the way it should be.”
A deep distrust, an awareness of the most powerful kind came to Mrs. Watson and she said, “What’s this boy like?”
“What boy?”
“The one who’s going to call you. The one who isn’t going to California.”
Virginia smiled. “Oh.” But she did not answer.
“How disabled is he?” She had a horror of maimed persons; she never let Virginia tell her about patients at the hospital. “He’s not blind, is he?” That struck her as the worst, more awful than death.
“I think he just pulled something in his back. A slipped disc.”
“How old is he?”
“Around thirty.”
“Thirty!” It was something like being maimed; an image sprang up: Virginia with a balding middle-aged man who wore suspenders. “Oh my God,” she said. She thought, then, of the time her daughter had frightened her the most; it had happened when they were staying near Plumpoint, at a cabin on the Chesapeake Bay. The children had run about collecting Coca-Cola bottles left behind by the bathers; they sold the bottles for two cents apiece and with the money they hurried off—gangs of them—to the amusement park at Beverley Beach. One afternoon, with money from bottles, Virginia had hired a man to row her out onto the bay in a rowboat, a leaky hulk of a rowboat covered with barnacles and stinking of seaweed. For almost an hour the boat had bobbed around, out among the waves; on the beach she and her husband watched with despair and fury until finally the fifty cents worth of time had been used up and the man rowed back.
“Maybe not quite thirty,” Virginia said. “But older than I am.” She continued making cigarettes with the machine. “Hes had a lot of trouble. But he doesn’t seem to understand it; he just goes roaming around.”
“What—does he want?” she asked. “In a woman, I mean.”
Virginia said, “He doesn’t seem to want anything.” After a pause she said, “Maybe just to talk. He wants to be an electronic engineer after the war.”
“When do I get to meet him?”
Again smiling, Virginia said, “Never.”
“I want to meet him.” She heard her voice squawk out.
“I think he went to California.”
“No, you don’t think so. Bring him out so I can meet him. Or don’t you want me to meet him?”
“There’s no point in it.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’d like to very much. Does he have a car? he can drive you out next time. What about next weekend?” Her desire was to get him here before anything happened. To get him to this place first. “Of course it’s your life,” she said. “You understand that and so do I.”
Virginia began to laugh.
“Isn’t it?” Mrs. Watson demanded. “Isn’t it your own life?”
Nodding, Virginia said, “Yes.”
“Don’t try to put the responsibility on me. You have to make your own decisions; you have a job and you’re an adult, out on your own.”
“Yes,” Virginia said, in a sober voice.
At two o’clock in the afternoon Virginia left and her mother walked with her as far as the bus stop. When she returned to the house the telephone was ringing.
The voice on the wire said, “Is Virginia there?”
“No,” Mrs. Watson said, out of breath. She recognized Penny, Virginia’s roommate. “She’s already left; she just now left.” At the end of the hall the front door stood open. A paper boy walked past along the sidewalk, folding his papers; he glanced in, hesitated, and then tossed the paper onto the porch.
“There’s somebody here who wants her,” Penny said. “I guess she’ll be home soon if she’s already left.”
“Who is it?” Mrs. Watson demanded. “Is it that one who was going to California? Ask him if he’s the one.”
“Yes,” Penny said. “He didn’t go.”
“Tell him I want to talk to him. Put him on the phone. Do you know his name?”
“His name’s Roger something,” Penny said. “Just a minute, Mrs. Watson.” A long silence followed and she listened; she pressed the receiver against her ear. Off in the distance people stirred and murmured, a man and his voice, Penny’s voice, then steps and jarrings of the phone.
“Hello,” Mrs. Watson said.
“Hello,” a man said, a muffled voice.
“This is Virginia’s mother,” she said. “Are you the man who was going to California? You didn’t go, did you? Then you’re going to be around for a while, is that right?” She waited, breathing as little as she could, but he said nothing. “I told Virginia to bring you out here for dinner,” she said. “So I’m expecting you; I told her next weekend. Can you come then? Can you drive her out? You have a car, don’t you?”
A stirring. And then he said in his muffled voice, “Yeah, I guess so.”
“I’m looking forward to meeting you,” she said. “Your name is Roger? What’s the rest of your name?”
“Lindahl.”
“All right, Mr. Lindahl,” she said. “I’ll telephone Virginia during the week and tell her when dinner will be. I’m very glad to have met you, Mr. Lindahl.” She hung up the phone and walked away, along the hall to the front door, where she snatched up the newspaper the boy had thrown.
She found her glasses case, put on her glasses, and carried the newspaper to the kitchen table. After fixing herself a cup of Nescafe instant coffee she lit one of the cigarettes that she and Virginia had manufactured and began to read the news.
Do I really think she’s that stupid? she thought, laying down the newspaper.
Through the kitchen window she noticed the piles of rose prunings; she had not finished raking them to the back. So she took her cigarette with her, outdoors to the backyard, where she had hung the rake. Soon she had dragged the piles together in one heap; she whacked at them with the rake, her cigarette between her lips. Now, she thought, I’m scandalizing the neighborhood. Shocking the Southern ladies by smoking in my own yard.
