Girls In 3-B, The (12 page)

She wasn't sure what she was looking for. A drink of water, maybe. If she could find a drink of water her throat would stop hurting, and she would wake up and everything would be all right.

But she wasn't asleep. Through everything
--
the colors, the silvery singing, the lines, the fever of intensity brought on by the repetition of a single special word
--
she had been able to see the tan-colored wall paper and the white net curtain, torn at the bottom. She could move around. Once, she was sure, she had gone to the sink in the corner and run a glassful of water for herself. She opened her eyes and looked, cautiously, because the floor was rolling. The plastic glass lay on the floor in the corner, in a drying puddle.

Her ears started growing. They grew into morning-glory horns like the horn of an old-fashioned gramophone, and long pink vines grew out of them.

She forced her eyes wider. The pink vines disappeared slowly; she could see them against the tan walls, dissolving. A last leaf remained, waving in an invisible breeze. Far in the distance the bells began to ring again, high and sweet and shrill.

Three goats sat on the foot of the bed, grinning at her. They had curved horns and pointed beards, and they were totally evil. The middle one was the tallest
--
and the most dangerous.

A man sat on the straight chair, his head lolled back against the wall, his bearded face lifted to the vision. He grinned at her lazily. "Beautiful," he said. "Beautiful. All the colors. Did you have colors
?
"

She nodded. It made her head ache. The goats were gone. Fuzzily, she decided she must be awake. She got to her feet like a camel getting up, trying not to be dizzy.

"I think I'm coming out of it," Alan said dreamily. '"Let's do it again some time, it's wonderful."

"I feel terrible."

"Suffering is good," Alan said slowly. He shut his eyes and lapsed into immobile silence.

There was evil in the room. Or was it only stale air? She turned, seeing the floor tilt and slant, and crossed to the window. Outside, rain was falling in a twilight murk. "What time is it?"

Alan said, "Mmm."

She looked around for a glass and, finding none, ran water into her cupped hand and drank. Her mouth felt swollen and sore, as though Novocain had worn off and the prick of needle and drill were just becoming real. "I have to go home."

"What for?"

She considered. The faucet was still running; she shut it off, and in the basin was a perfect seahorse, green, about an inch long. She reached carefully to pick it up. It disappeared. "I'm seeing things," she said, stricken.

"The Indians."

"What?"

"Part of their religion."

"Maybe that's why." This didn't quite make sense, but she was too far gone to analyze it. She began looking around for her belongings. She still had on her dress, very rumpled. But her feet were bare and her face felt stiff. She found her shoes under the bed and got them on, although they were too small, and located her purse. She tried to count the money in her billfold, with some faint idea of calling a cab, but her mind wasn't working and she couldn't remember the numbers.

"Hey, where you going?”

"Out."

This got him down off his chair. "Don't go away. We did this together, didn't we
?
Now we have to talk about it. Get it down on paper before it all goes away. Baby, that's what we did it for."

Annice said, "Oh, to hell with it."

He said, "That's what's the matter with all you people. As soon as you get the real thing, it scares you." He sat down again, folding his arms across his chest. Plainly, he expected her to change her mind and stay. She waited until his eyelids began to droop again, then tiptoed across the room and let herself out.

The stairs were miles long, and the railing curved and undulated as it hadn't done before, but she made it. Out on the street, in the fresh damp air, she felt a little more awake. Some of the sensation of walking in her sleep went away. She saw with dim surprise that it was getting dark. But it had been dark when they left the party; she remembered seeing the sky spattered with small bright pinpoint stars when she got into Alan's car. Then what time was it? What
--
she blinked
--
what
day
was it? She looked around, but the few cars cruising past and the people on the sidewalks were no real indication of anything.
Couldn't be Monday,
she reasoned; the neighborhood stores were open on Monday evening until nine, but the corner drugstore and the specialty shop next to it were closed and dark.

She guessed she could walk home. It was only five blocks, half a mile. She looked fixedly ahead, because to turn her head meant losing her balance, and if she fell down she wouldn't be able to get up again. Her knees wobbled, but her mind was clearing. A dim white shape capered on the walk in front of her, and she was stricken with panic at the appearance of another hallucination, but when she reached it she saw that it was a crumpled newspaper blown by the sunset wind.

She didn't feel tired any more, physically. A little cramped from sitting so long
--
how long?
--
in the same position, but not tired. With the speedup in circulation and the easing of her muscles she began to feel better.
Maybe that’s why its part of their religion,
she thought, proud of herself for being so logical.
Maybe it makes them feel good.
She was beginning to be curious about the experience.
Have to see what I can find in the library.

She didn't want to remember her own visions, though. In any case, they were already beginning to fade. The colors couldn't have been as bright as she remembered them or the noises as loud, or the reiterated words as full of meaning. She thought again of the goats and shivered. Whatever time it was, somebody was home. Lights were on in the apartment. She needn't have fumbled through her bag with huge swollen fingers, trying to find the key. The door into the hall was open a crack, as if they were expecting somebody. She went in, feeling safer and quite calm now that she was home.

All of the lights were on, and the living room was abnormally neat. Pat and Barby sat on the davenport, close together as though for mutual protection. Their faces were grave and strained. Jackson Carter sat in the armchair, smoking. A loaded ashtray at his elbow indicated that he had been there quite a while. A thin girl in black slacks, whom Annice had passed in the hall once or twice, sat beside the window. The atmosphere was one of silent waiting. She wondered
--what's the matter, what's happened?
She stood in the doorway looking from face to face. "What's the matter
?
" she said.

One thing was sure, Barby decided, she wasn't cut out for excitement and late hours. She woke late on Monday morning headachey and hung-over from all the excitement of the two preceding days, to find that she had slept through the shrilling of the alarm clock and it was now half-past eight, the hour when she was supposed to report for work. The other side of the double bed was empty, so she supposed Pat had got off all right, but through the half-open door she could see Annice still huddled into her blankets like a cocoon. One bare foot stuck out, dirty-soled and defenseless.
Lie there and snore,
Barby thought resentfully, feeling the weight of her two sleepless nights.

She yawned as she pulled on her seersucker housecoat and tiptoed downstairs to call the Store. Sleepy as she was, she was watchful of two things; to leave the heavy front door of the apartment off the latch, and to look around the turn in the stairs before she descended the second flight. She had been locked out once, and had had to sit on the hall floor, with nothing to pass the time, until Pat came home from work. That was annoying enough. But to be caught by Rocco in a flimsy nightgown and thin wrapper, locked out, on a Monday morning when everyone else in the building had gone to work.
I
don't think I could stand it,
she thought, closing the door of the phone booth and dropping in her dime.

She was desperate enough to think of praying, and would have except for her long-time conviction that God had forgotten all about her when she was thirteen. Probably a good thing, too. If the Almighty took time out to recall her, He might go into the matter of her guilt and reject her altogether.

She made her excuses mechanically, aware that she sounded vague and that the switchboard girl probably thought she was hung-over, and got back upstairs without meeting anyone.

Her entrance woke Annice. She sat up yawning, her reddish hair tangled, her face pasty and heavy-eyed. "My God, what a night! What is this, Monday
?
"

"You're late to class."

"Well then, you're late to work too."

"We were half crazy with worry all day Saturday and all day yesterday. That's all." Pat's cup stood in the sink, so that was all right
--
she had gone off on time. Barby made coffee angrily, rattling the can against the sink, lighting the burner with a firmer thumb pressure against the pilot than was called for. "Nobody got any sleep at all Saturday night," she said. "Jackson stayed all night. God only knows what the neighbors thought."

"Probably thought he was laying you both, turn and turn about." Annice stood up, stretching. They had shoved and pulled her into pajamas after the neighbors left, but she hadn't washed, and Barby fancied that a queer acrid odor hung about her. "Drink your coffee. You need a bath." Annice sat down at the kitchen table and leaned on her elbows, riveting her gaze to the coffeepot as though it held some explanation. "It's the funniest thing," she said slowly. "After a thing like that, everything seems sort of dull and flat. It makes you see how people get to be dope addicts." She raised her head and looked at Barby. "I don't mean I want to be a dope addict. I've never even smoked a reefer. But at that, I'm kind of glad I did it once."

"Just let us know the next time. The cops will appreciate it."

"You didn't call the cops!”

"Sure as hell did."

She let it drop, folding her hands around the warm cup. "Alan wants us to write it up for some magazine."

"Under your own names?"

"Oh God, how would I know?"

Barby poured herself another cup of coffee. She added canned milk, poking the clogged hole in the top of the can open with a bobby pin. "The farther away you stay from that Alan character, the better off you're going to be," she said. "He's crazy."

"Ordinary people always think that about unusual ones."

"What's so unusual about him, except that he hasn't got any morals
?
"

Annice was silent. Barby frowned. "God, I ache in places I didn't even know I had."

"We got to his place around one o'clock Friday night," Annice said. "What time was it when I got home
?
"

"Around ten. Yeah, because Jack had the nine o'clock news on the radio. We listened to all the news broadcasts to see if anybody was found dead in an alley, or anything."

Annice figured. "Then I was out about forty hours. Funny thing, though, I wasn't asleep. I don't know if Alan was or not, but I wasn't. I mean, I could get up and walk around, and everything."

"Will you please shut up?" Barby's hand shook as she lit a cigarette. "I don't want to hear about it."

"But it's interesting."

"Sure, sure. I have to go to work. Somebody has to pay the rent in this dump." Barby rinsed her cup under the cold faucet and turned it upside down on the drainboard. "It's bad enough to come in late on Monday, everybody thinks you had a great big week end. I don't want to get fired."

She pulled her clothes on angrily.
God damn the little brat,
she thought meanly,
she could act a little bit sorry. I'm no angel,
she reminded herself, conscious as always of the hidden corruption no one knew about,
but I don't go around worrying everyone else half to death.
She applied lipstick carefully, feeling a little proud because she hid her own sufferings so well. "I'm going. I don't suppose you've thought to call the college and tell them you're not coming in."

"They'll find it out," Annice said. A tentative smile wavered around her mouth. "Have a good day."

A fine day,
Barby fumed, missing the northbound train by a split second and settling down on one of the platform benches for a twenty-minute wait.
Oh, this looks like being a perfectly wonderful day.

She clocked in just as Betty Pelecek, the other stock girl in Blouses, was going out for coffee. Betty winked at her. Her expression was a compound of curiosity, resentment and the gloating anticipation of someone waiting to hear a dirty story. Barby hated her. She shifted her coin purse and rattail comb to the plastic box, checked her jacket and handbag and went into the stockroom as quietly as possible.

Miss Gordon, her supervisor, said, "Sick this morning, Miss Morrison?" She shook her head. "My roommate went on a week-end binge. I slept through the alarm."

"Well, that's an honest answer." Miss Gordon's lips quirked. "Most of them come dragging in here hung-over and tell you they're dying with flu, or something."

Barby laughed reluctantly. Miss Gordon patted her on the shoulder. "Get busy now. Betty's not worth a damn this morning."

Ordinarily she would have resented the touch. Today she was so tired and headachey
--
yes, and so angry with Annice for causing all this bother
--
that she welcomed a suggestion of sympathy. She looked after Miss Gordon's retreating back with gratitude, and then set to work marking and threading price tags, diverted from her displeasure.

That's the way I'd like to look,
she thought, picturing Miss Gordon's calm, intelligent face and her small neat figure.
Slim and tailored, and not so damn sexy. I look like a fugitive from a burlesque show even in slacks--especially in slacks.
Miss Gordon wore suits and simple blouses, with one good bit of costume jewelry, and she looked all of a piece. You couldn't imagine her being flustered or doing anything stupid or awkward. It seemed to Barby a good way to be, neat and integrated and without problems.