Next to Love (31 page)

She wrings out the sponge and begins wiping the counters. Someone has left the top off the Aunt Jemima cookie jar. She looks inside. It’s empty. She carries it to the sink and begins washing. It was, she remembers as she soaps, the first gift Al’s mother gave her. Fancy china it’s not, she said, but cookies like you make, Al and the children should know where to find. It was more than a compliment, it was a concession. Perhaps Al had not made such a big mistake after all. She puts the top in the drain board and picks up the bottom. It’s bulbous and unwieldy. She reaches inside to sponge it, runs the water in, turns it over to let the water out. She feels the jar slipping and tries to catch it, but the gloves make her clumsy. It hits the sink and shatters. She stands looking down at the pieces. It is an inexpensive cookie jar, nothing to cry over. But she does.

A few days later, Al comes home from the office and says he’d like to have his parents over for dinner that Friday night, and his uncle, and the cousin his uncle brought over after the war, the one who was in a concentration camp. He says it as if he is expecting an argument, though he must know she will not give him one.

“I think the kids ought to get to know him,” he adds.

She does not disagree with that either.

THE WEEK AFTER AL’S FAMILY
comes to dinner, she goes downtown to Diamond’s and buys another cookie jar. This one is a Dutch girl with a cap. By the time the children get home from school, it is filled with chocolate chip cookies. Jack doesn’t notice the jar is new. Betsy likes it. Susan grieves for the old one. Even inanimate objects make a claim on her soft heart. Millie knows how she feels. Every time she looks at the jar, it reproaches her.

Al does not reproach her. He has never mentioned the incident. His silence is worse than a quarrel. It eats away at them. That’s why she makes the offer. She lost one husband. She is not going to forfeit another.

If she had not already made up her mind, the item on the late news would have persuaded her. They are sitting side by side on the sofa in the family room when the announcer launches into it.

A military transport plane has crashed in Washington state, the ninth crash in three weeks. Thirty-six people are dead, three women and eight children among them. Whole families were wiped out, the announcer intones. She feels as if someone has laid an icy hand on the back of her neck.

Half an hour later, the story follows them upstairs. It is like a shadow lurking in the corners of the bedroom. When she goes into the bathroom to cream her face, she thinks a light over the mirror has burned out, the room strikes her as that dim.

“Al,” she says as she comes back into the bedroom.

He is setting the radio alarm and does not look up.

“How would you like it if I converted?”

Now he looks up.

“To Judaism, I mean.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Would you like me to? It doesn’t make that much difference to me one way or the other, and if it would make you happy …”

He sits staring at her. It doesn’t make that much difference to her one way or the other. Imagine the luxury. Imagine religion being a choice, not a brand. The thought of it makes him dizzy. But the rest of the sentence anchors him. If it would make you happy.

His face cracks open and a grin spills out. “Thanks,” he says, “but let’s not get carried away.”

SIXTEEN

Babe

JUNE 1954

B
ABE STANDS IN FRONT OF THE WESTERN UNION OFFICE. SHE HAS
no idea how she got here. Yes, she does. Claude’s reunion propelled her.

The night before, he drove to Springfield to see some of his old army buddies. The men he trusted with his life. She did not use the phrase, though she still cannot get it out of her head. She merely told him to have a good time. But she was apprehensive. She remembers the aftermath of the funeral he went to in Haverhill. He was silent for weeks. Then he took a swing at himself in the bathroom mirror. But that time he went to a burial. This is a reunion. And that was years ago, before he started to mend.

When she heard him coming up the stairs, she pretended to be asleep. She did not want him to think she was waiting up for him. She did not want him to know she was still holding her breath.

When she wakes the next morning, he is asleep. She is quiet going into the shower. He comes into the bathroom a few minutes later. She braces herself, though she has no idea for what. He calls good morning over the sound of running water.

By the time she turns off the shower and reaches for a towel, he is at the sink, shaving. She wraps the towel around herself and stands watching him. His hand is steady as he draws the razor down his cheek, carving a smooth path through the white lather. The otherness of the act sends an erotic charge. It is the sexual divide that binds—not the otherness of the war that slams down like a wall between them.

She asks if he had a good time. He says he was glad to see the men again. The ones he trusts with his life. She has got to stop this. He is better. She is happy for him. She is relieved for herself. And she could not be more jealous if he had been with another woman.

After she puts the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher, makes the bed, and starts a load of laundry in the washing machine, she drives downtown. She will return her books to the library, take out new ones, and go to the post office for stamps. She is sure she can think of a few other errands as well.

She parks the car in a lot a block from the Western Union office. These days nobody even thinks of looking for a spot on the street. It seems as if every family in town has two cars, and that doesn’t include the kids with their jalopies.

As she is getting out of the car, she spots Mac Swallow going into the drugstore. He comes home more often than he used to when he first moved to Boston. He even turns up at Grace and Morris’s for dinner every now and then, just as he used to when it was Grace and Charlie.

She goes to the library, stops at the post office, and spends half an hour in Diamond’s, examining sheets she is not going to buy. Then, without knowing why or how, she finds herself standing in front of the Western Union office, staring through the plate-glass window. She will not go in. She has no business there. She just wants to see it again.

Sid Taylor sits behind the desk reading a magazine. The bench where B.J. used to wait is empty. She has heard that the office is not as busy as it used to be. These days people tend to pick up the telephone, especially now that they don’t have to use an operator and can dial long distance direct.

She is glad the office is not busy. She does not want it to go on without her. She wants it to be as arrested as she has been.

She has no desire to go back to those days. Only a crazy woman would want to go back to a life of constant fear, aching longing, and unbearable loneliness. Only a fool would want to go back to that office reeking of death and grief. But it was her own front line in the war, and for three years she womaned it with a singleness of purpose. That is what she misses. Being useful. Having a cause.

It occurs to her as she stands staring through the window at Sid Taylor, who sits at the desk where she used to cut the ticker tape, paste it on the forms, and put the forms in the envelopes to be delivered, that she is as bad as the men. She has become a war lover.

AUTUMN 1955

Babe does not stop to open her umbrella. She is too eager to get out of the house. She puts her head down like a charging bull and makes a dash for the car.

Sometimes she wonders why she still bothers to visit them. Her father barely says hello to her. Her mother wears her resentment like the old sweaters she sits huddled in at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table. She wonders where the new sweaters she gives her every Christmas go. Perhaps she passes them on to her sisters. Babe would not mind that. Or maybe when her mother sees her drive up in front of the house, she runs into the bedroom to take off one of the Christmas sweaters and put on an old ratty one. Just to show Miss Too-Big-For-Her-Britches, as her father calls her. Her mother is more devious. Babe used to think her mother sewed her that awful pink cotton-candy dress because it was the kind of thing her mother would have looked good in when she was young and had no idea all those flounces would be a disaster on a girl with wide shoulders and a rangy body. Now she is not so sure the sabotage was unintentional.

“When did you start using that color lipstick?” her mother asks.

“Don’t you like it?”

Silence.

“You changed your hair.”

“It’s exactly the same.”

“That must be it. I was you, I’d get a new ’do.”

This time Babe does not take the bait.

“You better not let yourself go,” her mother warns. “I bet there are plenty of pretty young teachers at that school of Claude’s.”

“I bet there are,” she says as she stands, puts on her raincoat, and gets ready to make the dash to the car.

Inside it, she brushes the drops off her coat, but she cannot shake off the lingering ache of their meanness. She fears becoming like them. She never used to. When she went to work at Diamond’s, when she married Claude, when she ran the Western Union office, she knew she was escaping them. But these days, as she listens to them going at each other—not the way they used to, with shouts and threats and, from her father, slaps, but with verbal penknives—she hears her own voice nicking away at Claude. She hates herself for it, but the more ashamed of herself she is, the harder she runs at him.

She sits in the car, staring through the rain-sluiced windshield at the house she has just escaped. It is even shabbier now than when she was growing up in it. The street looks almost as forlorn as the pictures in
Life
of bombed-out cities after the war. Cardboard-patched windows gape like missing teeth in the run-down buildings. Front stoops lack a stair here, a railing there. The rain has turned the bald front yards into mud holes. The block is a wasteland of neglect and despair. The responsible neighbors, the ones who used to repair and paint and weed, have fled to the respectable frame houses on the east side of town or even to the new developments, thanks to prudent saving of their windfall wartime wages. Only the spendthrift, the slapdash, and the willfully shortsighted remain.

She starts the engine, pulls away from the curb, and heads north toward Sixth Street. The wipers beat back and forth against the windshield. The reflection of the traffic light is a red smear on the wet glass. She stops and sits waiting for it to change. When the wipers swipe past again, she sees a figure standing at the bus stop. The wipers have to go across a third time before she recognizes Frankie Hart. He does not even have an umbrella. She rolls down the window and shouts at him to get in. He sprints around the car to the passenger side, pulls open the door, and sticks his head in.

“You sure? I’m pretty soaked.”

“That’s why I’m offering you a ride. Get in.”

He climbs in. Water puddles around his feet. A damp stain begins to spread on the upholstery.

“You headed for the factory?”

Claude said Frankie has an after-school job cleaning up scraps at the hat factory. He is saving money for Howard, where he is sure to be accepted.

“The bus depot,” he says.

She glances over at him, then back at the road. It is none of her business, but she cannot help being curious.

“Running away from home?”

“Just going to a meeting. Over in Amherst.”

He says no more, but as she turns onto Sixth Street and pulls up in front of the bus depot, he puts his hand on the door handle, then hesitates and turns back to her.

“Could I ask you another favor, Mrs. Huggins?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t tell my mother you gave me a lift. And especially don’t tell her I was going to a meeting in Amherst. I never should have mentioned it to you, but …” He shrugs.

“Your secret is safe with me.”

SHE IS GETTING OUT
of the car in her own garage when she notices the magazine on the front seat. It must have fallen out of Frankie’s pocket.
JET
is written in bold letters at the top. Beneath the name, a pretty young woman is showing plenty of leg. The magazine looks like a dozen others displayed on newsstands. The only difference is the girl on this cover is Negro. Babe does not know why she is surprised. She should have known that there are magazines published by Negroes about Negroes for Negroes. Only she didn’t. She carries the magazine inside and puts it with a stack of others.