Next to Love (33 page)

Afterward they lie, still tangled together, sweaty, gleeful, feeling strangely young. An image of Eloise Amison flashes through his mind. He does not even like large-breasted women, but he cannot help himself.

“Auden said it best,” he murmurs into her hair.

“What did Auden say best?” she asks his chest.

“ ‘Any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.’ I forget the rest, but it’s something about marriage being the creation of time and will.”

“We just got lucky,” she says.

“That too,” he agrees.

SEVENTEEN

Grace

JUNE 1954

G
RACE IS JUST FINISHING SETTING THE TABLE WHEN MORRIS
gets home. He puts his hat and bulky black doctor’s bag on the top shelf of the front hall closet. When she first knew him, that bag worked on her like the Miltowns some of the women she knows are beginning to take. Every time she thought of Charlie and decided she could not go through with it, Morris would turn up with that bag in his hand, and she would feel a calm settling over her. The bag was tangible proof of his goodness. He was a man who cured the ailing, tended the dying, and caused pain only in the interest of healing. Now it is just a black leather bag.

He comes into the dining room and kisses her on the cheek.

She does not pull away. She does not even notice. He might be holding a door open for her or passing the salt.

“Something smells good.”

“Pot roast.”

“I’m a lucky man.”

The comment is like the door held open or the salt passed. He has a litany of similar phrases. They ought to put you in mass production. How did I get so lucky? You and Amy are the best thing that ever happened to me. They are not lies, more like slogans or ads on the radio. She tunes those out too.

He takes this week’s issue of
Time
from the hall table, where she has left it for him, and goes into the sunporch. She does not pay much attention to that either. He is an easy man to live with. Affable. Appreciative. Unobtrusive.

She goes into the kitchen to slice the pot roast. All in all, it is not a bad arrangement, she thinks, as she takes the heavy iron pot from the oven. Amy has a male presence in the house, and all the magazines and books say that’s important. She does not want to think of the trouble fatherless girls can get up to. The situation is better for her too. She prefers being married to being a widow. No more having to be grateful to other women’s husbands for picking her up before and driving her home after parties, where no one wants her in the first place, because who wants an extra woman. No more having to rely on Claude or Al to mix the drinks before dinner or start the outdoor grill on a Sunday afternoon. No more having to listen to other women going on about their husbands or, worse still, stopping in the middle of a story because they realize she does not have one. Things could be worse. So why has the pot roast gone wavy through the shimmer of tears?

MAC HAS MADE UP
his mind. He is going to stay away from them. He has had enough of being the husband’s buddy, the faithful hanger-on. He has had enough of watching her and having to watch himself.

The phone on his desk rings.

“I’m sorry to bother you at your office,” she says.

She has never called him here before. “It’s no bother.”

“But I have to talk to you before Morris gets home.” Her voice is low and throaty, more intimate over the phone than in person. “His birthday is next week. I thought I’d give him a surprise dinner on Saturday. The usual suspects, but I wanted to make sure you could make it.”

He tells himself not to read anything into the statement. She probably said the same thing to the rest of the crowd when she called each of them. But he cannot help himself.

“I’ll be there,” he says.

AUTUMN 1955

Amy stands in front of the mirror in the second-floor girls’ room, tugging on her bangs. She could kill her mother for making her get her hair cut at Diamond’s. Her mother insists it’s the best hair salon in town. Sure it is, if you’re a hundred years old. She tugs at her bangs again, but they won’t get any longer. She could kill her mother and commit hari-kari herself. Her first week in senior high school, and she looks like Mamie Eisenhower. That’s what Janice called her this morning. Mamie Amy. For the rest of her life, she’ll be known as Mamie Amy.

She takes half of her ponytail in each hand, pulls apart to tighten the elastic, and goes on frowning at herself in the mirror. Smile, grown-ups are always telling her. The other day, some man on the street she did not even know said it. Smile, he called out to her. A pretty girl like you should smile. She smiles at her reflection in the mirror. The stupid grin makes her look like a clown. She goes back to frowning and turns up the collar of her blouse. Her mother doesn’t let her leave the house with her collar turned up—she says it’s cheap—but her mother doesn’t know what she does once she gets to school. Even Miss Amison wears her collar up, and she’s a teacher. She wears a small scarf tied inside the collar and leaves the top three buttons of her blouse open. When she leans over, you can see white flesh spilling over the top of her bra.

Amy turns sideways to the mirror and pushes out her chest. She still has an A-cup profile. It’s pathetic.

Karen comes out of the stall and stands next to her at the sink, washing her hands. It’s mean to think it, but Karen makes her feel better. Karen has no profile at all. She wears a double-A and doesn’t even need that.

Amy gives another tug to her bangs, and they go out into the hall and head for Room 211, where the newspaper staff meets. She knows she’ll never make the paper, but her mother encouraged her to go out for it. Your father was a wonderful reporter, she said. If he had lived, there’s no telling how far he would have gone. She doesn’t pay much attention to her mother, but Aunt Babe told her she should try out for the paper too.

When she gets to the door, she almost turns around to leave. There must be fifteen sophomores in the room, all boys.

Eddie Montrose, the editor-in-chief, is sitting—no, lounging—on the teacher’s desk at the front of the room. A cigarette dangles from his full lips. They’re not allowed to smoke in school, but it’s after school, and the classroom has become the newspaper office. Still, the cigarette dangles from his lips, unlit. Gilly Jackson, the managing editor, is passing out mimeographed sheets of paper.

“Take a sheet,” Eddie says. “That has the bare facts of the story. Then grab a desk. When I give the word, start writing. Time counts. If you want to be a newspaperman”—he glances at Amy and Karen—“or gal,” he adds, as if the idea is a joke, “you have to learn to write fast. But keep it accurate. You’ve got twenty minutes.” He looks down at his watch. “Go.”

Amy knows she has done something wrong, because she finishes in fifteen. She does not hand in her story. People will think she’s showing off, or know she did it wrong. She keeps reading it over, trying to figure out her mistake. All she finds is a missing comma and a spelling error. She waits until two boys have walked to the front of the room and given Gilly their stories. She stands, keeps her head down as she goes, and hands in hers.

Three days later the list of the four sophomores who made the paper is posted on the bulletin board outside the principal’s office. Her name comes last, after three sophomore boys. She wonders if it’s a mistake.

Her first job on the paper is typing the stories the other reporters write. Except for the two other girls, one for each year, they’re all boys, so they don’t know how to type. Eddie Montrose is the only one who types his own stories. That’s because he writes them right on the typewriter. He sits at a desk, with a pencil behind his ear and an unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth, typing with two fingers. He hits the keys so hard sometimes she thinks he’s going to hurt the machine, or himself. When Miss Amison, who teaches English and is the faculty adviser, comes in, he does not take the cigarette out of his mouth, and she does not tell him to. All she does is lean over his desk. That slows down the typing.

One afternoon at the end of her first month on the paper, she is typing a story about the previous Saturday’s football game, when she realizes she is alone in the office with Eddie Montrose. Her finger hits the
D
instead of the
C
. After she makes three more mistakes in the same line, she pulls the paper out, crumples it, throws it in the wastebasket, and puts in a fresh sheet. She starts to type again, makes four mistakes in the first two lines, and takes the paper out. As she reaches for a fresh sheet, she notices that the other typewriter has stopped.

“You know the rule about baseball players,” he says.

She cannot believe he’s talking to her, but no one else is in the room.

“What?” she asks without turning around.

“If one guy fumbles, there’ll be a run of fumbles. Slow down, squirt, or we’ll run out of paper.”

She cannot believe he called her squirt. He makes up nicknames for most of the boys on the paper, but not for the girls. On the other hand, maybe he doesn’t know her name.

Then he does it again. She has finished typing the piece, and he has taken that and the story he was writing and put them in a manila folder, and she is putting on her coat, when he says, “Want a ride, squirt?”

She sits in the front seat, clutching her books to her chest, staring through the windshield as the flaming trees slide by, racking her brain for something to say. Her mind is blank as a washed blackboard. She looks down at the books on the seat between them, but she has nothing to say about chemistry or the history text Uncle Claude assigns for senior year, and she has never read
For Whom the Bell Tolls
.

He glances over and sees her staring at the books.

“You like Hemingway?”

She shrugs. She has never read Hemingway.

“What about poetry? Wait, don’t tell me. I bet you like Emily Dickinson.”

She does like Emily Dickinson, but she can tell from the way he says it that she’s not supposed to.

“Yeah, I figured. Girls always do. Eliot’s my man. At least the poetry is. The guy’s something else. That phony English gentleman stuff makes me sick. T.S., Mr. Eliot, I say to that.”

He looks over at her again and laughs. She knows he is waiting for a response, but she doesn’t know what it is supposed to be. She manages a smile.

“You don’t know what T.S. means, do you?”

“Aren’t they his initials?”

“Yeah, but that’s the joke. They also stand for tough shit.”

“Oh, sure,” she says.

“Oh, sure,” he mimics, then does the most amazing thing. He reaches over and tugs her ponytail.

He asks her where she lives, she tells him, and for the rest of the ride she doesn’t have to talk, because he is telling her about how Ernest Hemingway started out on a newspaper, and drove an ambulance in World War I, and covered the Spanish Civil War and World War II, and now that there’s no war he shoots big game in Africa.

“My father was a newspaper reporter. Before he died in the war.”

“My father’s a manager at the hat factory.” He shakes his head at the oncoming traffic. “Talk about dullsville. If I ever end up like that, I’ll kill myself.”

She isn’t sure what to say to that. She doesn’t want to insult his father, but she doesn’t want him to think she disagrees with him.

He pulls up in front of her house. She cannot stand for this to be over. She cannot wait to get away. The strain is too much.

“Thanks,” she says, and starts to open the door.

“Listen, squirt,” he says. “Want to go to the flicks Saturday night?”

Her heart flops over.

“Okay,” she says.

Then he does it again. He reaches over and tugs her ponytail.

SHE SAYS NOTHING
to her mother that night or the next. She is afraid her mother won’t let her go. She has gone to the movies twice before with boys, but they were her own age and didn’t drive. She wonders if she should lie and say she’s going with Karen. But then how will she explain to him that she wants to meet him at the movie? Finally, she brings up the subject while her mother is washing the dinner dishes and she’s drying.

“Eddie Montrose asked me to go to the movies Saturday night.”

Her mother turns from the dishes to her. “He’s a senior, isn’t he?”

She knew it.

“Yeah, but really responsible. He’s the editor of the newspaper.”

Her mother smiles. “As if I didn’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you haven’t stopped talking about him since you made the newspaper. What are you going to wear?”

She can go!

“It’s only Thursday,” she says, though she knows exactly what she is going to wear. Her pink sweater set and her gray pleated skirt. The only decision she hasn’t made is whether to keep her hair loose or put it in a ponytail. Loose seems better for a date, but she keeps remembering how he tugged her ponytail.

Her mother puts the last pot in the rack but goes on standing at the sink, staring out the window, though it’s dark and she can’t see anything but her own reflection.