Daughters of Eve (10 page)

"It did," Laura told her, "but Holly decided to change it. She told me yesterday. Its going to run real late, but we won't be sleeping over. They don't have enough beds, or something."

"Then you'll want me to pick you up?"

"No, just take your pill like always and go on to sleep, Mama. Mr. Underwood is going to drive us all home when the party's over." Laura shoved her chair back slowly so as to allow her mother an opportunity to move out from behind it. "In fact, I've got a ride over, too, with one of the girls. She's going to pick me up out in front in a couple of minutes. So you don't have to do a thing except wish me a nice time."

"You'll have one, I know," her mother said confidently. "I just wish there were going to be boys there to see how pretty you look."

Laura turned to press a kiss on the smooth, pink cheek and then, impulsively, threw her arms around her mother's plump shoulders in a spontaneous hug.

I wish that I could tell her, she thought regretfully. She'd be so happy for me, it's a dirty trick not to tell.

But she had made the promise.

"I don't want a bunch of people jabbering about us," Peter had told her. "That club of yours is a bunch of clucking chickens. That's one reason I broke off with Bambi; she was always telling everybody everything we did together. I like my privacy, you know?"

"I know," Laura had answered breathlessly. "I'm a private kind of person too."

She had pleaded sick when she phoned Holly to cancel out of the slumber party. It had been a lie then, but now it was close to the truth. Her face felt feverish and her stomach churned with nauseous growling sounds, and her heart was beating so hard that she was afraid that she might faint. There were other worries too—that the Daughters of Eve might phone tonight to ask how she was; that her mother might wait up for her and see who it was who brought her home—but if such things happened, she would have to reckon with them later.

Right now the important thing was to get herself over to the corner of Locust and Second Street for her meeting with Peter Grange.

The phone rang just as Ann Whitten was going out the door.

For a moment she was tempted not to answer it. They were late already because Kelly had had to wait for her father to come home with the car. Now she was parked in the driveway with the engine running, beeping the horn in a "hurry, get out here" manner, and over at the Underwoods' they were probably waiting dinner and growing more impatient by the minute.

Still, there was always the possibility that the phone call was important. Her parents had gone into town to an early movie, and with her father's health the way it was, something could have happened.

"Be right with you!" she yelled to Kelly, and turned hastily to snatch up the receiver.

"Hello?"

For a moment there was only silence. Then Dave's voice asked huskily, "Annie?

"Yes, it's me." He must have switched the position of the mouthpiece, because suddenly she could " hear his breathing, harsh and ragged, and a cord of fear twisted somewhere deep in her stomach. "Dave, is something wrong?"

"Yes." There was silence again, and then a strange, choking sound, and she realized to her horror that he was crying.

"What is it?" Ann demanded frantically. "What's happened? Dave, are you okay?"

"Mom's dead."

Ann's hand tightened convulsively on the receiver. She was sure she could not have heard him correctly.

"Oh, Dave, she can't be! I was over there just this afternoon. She was teaching me to make that chocolate cake where you use the mayonnaise instead of cooking oil. She was just fine."

The words were ridiculous, and she knew it even as she spoke them, yet the reality was impossible. Mom Brewer had been all right—oh, a little tired, maybe, but she had been chatty enough, even joking a little about the collection of odd recipes she was planning to give Ann as a wedding present. There was one cake you made from carrots and another with a can of tomato soup.

"She didn't eat much at supper," Dave said. "She said she was going to lie down awhile before she did the kitchen, and I told her to leave the dishes and I'd wash them when I got back from the evening chores. When I came in a few minutes ago, she was lying on the bed, and I thought she was sleeping. I went over to lay a blanket on her, and I saw she wasn't breathing."

"Oh, honey, how awful. How perfectly awful." Her heart wrenched for him. And as though she were there beside him, she saw the blue-eyed man bending worriedly over the still figure on the bed, reaching in stunned disbelief to touch the closed eyelids, speaking a name and hearing nothing in answer but silence.

"Maybe she's just unconscious," she whispered. "A little stroke or something. You've called a doctor, haven't you?"

"He should be here any time now. He's called for an ambulance out of Adrian, but it won't help any, Annie."

"You're sure." It was a statement rather than a question.

"Can you come?"

"Of course. Kelly can drive me. She's here now, parked out in the driveway. We were just leaving for Holly's."

"Oh, yes—the slumber party. I'd forgotten. That's why I wasn't going to see you tonight." He paused, fumbling, trying to put the pieces of life together to make some sort of pattern, yet unable to focus. "If you think you ought to go there first—"

"Dave, don't be crazy. How could I even begin to think about a stupid party now! You do want me with you, don't you?"

"Yes, I want you." His voice broke. "Annie, honey, please come now. Come right away. I need you so much."

"I'm on my way. You hang on there, darling. I love you."

"I love—you—too." He was weeping unashamedly now, and she was also as she placed the receiver back on the hook and hurried across the living room to the front door.

CHAPTER 8

The November 6 meeting of the Modesta Chapter of Daughters of Eve was called to order by the president, Fran Schneider. The pledge was repeated. The secretary, Ann Whitten, read the minutes from the previous meeting, and Bambi Ellis presented the treasurer's report.

"Thirty-two dollars and seventy cents," she read. "And a couple of people I know had better get themselves in gear and turn in their November dues or we're never going to be able to afford the material for the nursing-home curtains."

Irene Stark observed the girl with satisfaction. When she had taken on the sponsorship of the group at the beginning of the school year, she had not been sure that she was going to take to her. Bambi had the sort of striking beauty that came across as not quite real: the hair, the skin, the figure were all so perfect that she might have stepped straight out of a TV commercial.

It had come as a heartening surprise to discover that beneath that surface the girl was made of steel wire.

"I gave Pete his walking papers," she had announced to Irene one Monday morning between classes. "If there's one thing I don't need, it's a male chauvinist trying to run my life for me. Do you know he was telling me what I could and couldn't do with my spare time, exactly as though he were my husband!"

If only they all had Bambi's strength and self-confidence, Irene thought now, surveying the array of young faces before her. If only they were all able to stand up for themselves and demand of life the things that they deserved. Here was Ann Whitten, as talented an artist as had ever come through one of her classes, blithely preparing to destroy the possibility of any sort of an art career by settling down at eighteen to marry a clod of a farmer. Here was bright, level-headed Kelly Johnson, who might make a fine lawyer someday, setting as her life's goal secretarial school. She'd spend a lifetime brewing coffee and typing letters for some demanding male boss with half the native intelligence she had.

And Tammy Carncross. What had happened to Tammy? Tammy with her dreamy eyes and sweet, expressive face was a little shy but liked by everybody. What had caused her to act so strangely at the initiation meeting? That was a worry, and so was Jane Rheardon, sitting quiet and withdrawn with her chair pulled a little away from the rest of the circle, one of them and yet not one of them, a sister and yet strangely unreachable. Jane needed friends to talk to. Well, they were here. Why was she unable to open up to them?

And then there was Laura Snow. Laura was involved with someone. Attuned as she was to the emotions of her girls, Irene could pinpoint the very weekend it had started, for Laura had come to school the next week with an odd sort of glow about her, a dreamy, drifting look that Irene had seen on the faces of girls before. My dear, she had thought, poor child, you must get a grip on things. There were girls who could handle sexual relationships during their teen years, and there were others who were not emotionally equipped for them. Laura definitely fell into the latter category.

Especially disturbing to Irene was the fact that she was not able to discover the identity of the boyfriend. Laura continued to walk through the halls by herself or with girl friends, and at lunch she sat at a table with Fran and Paula. No boy hovered by her locker or carried her books to classes, and when school was out she waited alone at the south door of the building for Ruth Grange, who walked home in the same direction. Still, there was about Laura the unmistakable aura of a girl who has a lover, and Irene was finally forced to the conclusion that he was not a student at Modesta. This opened the door to all sorts of distressing possibilities. There were men in the world who made a game out of seducing young girls, especially those as vulnerable and inexperienced as Laura.

On Irene's first teaching day at Modesta, she had spotted Laura alone at a table in the school cafeteria, hunched over a wedge of chocolate cake, her jaws moving rhythmically, her eyes glued to the wall as though it were a movie screen portraying a situation far more intriguing than the bustle of activity around her. The girl's stolid acceptance of her loneliness had struck Irene as pathetic, and it had jolted her back in place and time to another girl alone in a crowd of her contemporaries, defiantly pretending that she didn't care.

That girl had been Irene herself. She had not had a weight problem; for her there had been the simple fact that, by the standards of her day, she was ugly. In an era when blond daintiness was considered the essence of femininity, Irene's swarthy complexion and coarse, black hair had set her apart. Heavy brows, a strong-boned face, and a shadow of dark fuzz across the upper lip had completed the unappetizing picture. Like Laura, she had moved alone through a social scene of teen-age pairing, holding herself aloof in an attempt to convince her classmates that such idiotic behavior was beyond her comprehension.

On the day that she overheard her father remark quite matter-of-factly to her mother that "We'd better get her all the education we can, because, God knows, she's never going to find a husband to support her," Irene had decided to kill herself. This decision had lasted for the length of time it had taken her to lock herself in the bathroom and extract the razor blades from her father's shaving kit. At that point there had flashed through her mind a vision of her mother, whom she loved, gazing down upon her daughter's body on the blood-drenched tiles and being carried off, shrieking, to a sanitarium. A wispy little person of a sensitive nature, Mrs. Stark had a history of emotional breakdowns.

So Irene had put back the blades, unlocked the door, and kept on living. The following year her parents had separated, and her mother's final breakdown had occurred. For cold comfort, Irene had the knowledge that she herself was not responsible. She accepted her college tuition from her father and never again acknowledged his existence.

In college, for the first time in her life, she fell in love. The man was a dreamy, bespectacled art professor, married, with children in high school. Their romance lasted several months before the professor's wife paid a visit to Irene in her dorm room. She did not rant or weep, she simply sat on Irene's lumpy bed with her legs demurely crossed at the ankles and explained that her husband was going through what she termed "his midlife crisis."

"He feels youth slipping away," she explained, "and he compensates by cultivating young female students." Irene, it seemed, was one of a number of these who came and went as semester followed semester.

"You're worth better than that, aren't you, dear?" the woman asked her.

Numbly, Irene nodded. Then she asked a question of her own.

"Why do you stay with him?"

"I'm used to it," the woman told her. "Besides, what else is there for me to do? I've got five kids. I've never held a job. I'm stuck." She leaned forward in a conspiratorial manner and took Irene's hand. "Don't ever get stuck, dear. Take it from somebody who knows what it's all about. You have that first baby, and they've got you. You're a sharp girl, I can tell that. I used to be sharp once too, can you believe it? But I let myself get buried, and I could never dig my way out again."

"I'm an education major," Irene said. "I'm minoring in art."

"You want to teach painting?"

"I want to help kids with talent learn to express themselves."

"If that's what you want, go to it," the woman said, "Don't let them stop you."

"Nobody's trying to stop me," Irene told her wryly. "I'm not exactly the type men stand in line for."

"Don't underestimate yourself. It's not always a pretty face that hooks them. Sometimes it's the challenge of trying to keep a strong woman down." The professor's wife uncrossed her ankles and got to her feet. "Well, good luck, dear. I've enjoyed our talk. I must say, my husband's taste is improving."