What Was Mine: & Other Stories (7 page)

God, it brought back memories of the days when I drank. Of that awful apartment above the grocery store with the gas leak.

Then, if you can believe it, Betty was taking me to task. She was saying that she had been unnerved by having to stop by so many times. That it was her
job
to drop off the items, and that she hoped I was happy that I had finally found time in my busy schedule to receive them. She grabbed up her poncho and moved her foot in such an odd way that I thought she might have been about to kick the dog, then thought better of it.

When my husband got back from cooking soil, I told him about Betty’s visit, starting at the beginning: the information about the carnival; the outdoor dances at the greenhouse. I left out the part about the retarded people, or whatever they were, because he always accused me of telling him depressing things. I skipped that and went right to the golf ball, the parking ticket, and the map. It was one of the last times my husband and I ever embraced. We had to, or we both would have fallen over laughing.

During the afternoon, the golf ball dropped off the edge of the table and rolled off to join a dust ball of similar size in the corner of the room. There was space in that house, and some lovely furniture, and sitting in the sunlight at the table that day with Betty, I knew that I was going to miss the place. We knew when we took it that we were going out on a limb financially. We just thought that a nice place might bring us luck—that it might cheer us up, and that then things might start to go our way. Betty’s visit and the chair’s collapse certainly would have become our family story if we’d stayed together, but that didn’t happen, so it became instead a story that I often remember, going over the details silently, by myself.

The map was useful for wrapping glasses—the one piece of white paper in among the newspaper.

When we left, we took nothing that wasn’t ours.

T
his is a story about Jeanette, who is a working girl. She sometimes thinks of herself as a traveler, a seductress, a secret gourmet. She takes a one-week vacation in the summer to see her sister in Michigan, buys lace-edged silk underpants from a mail-order catalogue, and has improvised a way, in America, to make crème fraîche, which is useful on so many occasions.

Is this another story in which the author knows the main character all too well?

Let’s suppose, for a moment, that the storyteller is actually mystified by Jeanette, and only seems to stand in judgment because words come easily. Let’s imagine that in real life there is, or once was, a person named Jeanette, and that from a conversation the storyteller had with her, it could be surmised that Jeanette has a notion of freedom, though the guilty quiver of the mouth when she says “Lake Michigan” is something of a giveaway about how she really feels. If the storyteller is a woman, Jeanette might readily confide that she is a seductress, but if the author is a man, Jeanette will probably keep quiet on that count. Crème fraîche is crème fraîche, and not worth thinking about. But back to the original supposition: Let’s say that the storyteller is a woman, and that Jeanette discusses the pros and cons of the working life, calling a spade a spade, and greenbacks greenbacks, and if Jeanette is herself a good storyteller, Lake Michigan sounds exciting, and if she isn’t, it doesn’t. Let’s say that Jeanette talks about the romance in her life, and that the storyteller finds it credible. Even interesting. That there are details: Jeanette’s lover makes a photocopy of his hand and drops the piece of paper in her in-box; Jeanette makes a copy of her hand and has her trusted friend Charlie hang it in the men’s room, where it is allowed to stay until Jeanette’s lover sees it, because it means nothing to anyone else. If the storyteller is lucky, they will exchange presents small enough to be put in a breast pocket or the pocket of a skirt. Also a mini French-English/English-French dictionary (France is the place they hope to visit); a finger puppet; an ad that is published in the “personals” column, announcing, by his initials, whom he loves (her), laminated in plastic and made useful as well as romantic by its conversion into a keyring. Let’s hope, for the sake of a good story, they are wriggling together in the elevator, sneaking kisses as the bubbles rise in the watercooler, and she is tying his shoelaces together at night, to delay his departure in the morning.

Where is the wife?

In North Dakota or Memphis or Paris, let’s say. Let’s say she’s out of the picture even if she isn’t out of the picture.

No no no. Too expedient. The wife has to be there: a presence, even if she’s gone off somewhere. There has to be a wife, and she has to be either determined and brave, vile and addicted, or so ordinary that with a mere sentence of description, the reader instantly knows that she is a prototypical wife.

There is a wife. She is a pretty, dark-haired girl who married young, and who won a trip to Paris and is therefore out of town.

Nonsense.
Paris?

She won a beauty contest.

But she can’t be beautiful. She has to be ordinary.

It suddenly becomes apparent that she is extraordinary. She’s quite beautiful, and she’s in Paris, and although there’s no reason to bring this up, the people who sponsored the contest do not know that she’s married.

If this is what the wife is like, she’ll be more interesting than the subject of the story.

Not if the working girl is believable, and the wife’s exit has been made credible.

But we know how that story will end.

How will it end?

It will end badly—which means predictably—because either the beautiful wife will triumph, and then it will be just another such story, or the wife will turn out to be not so interesting after all, and by default the working girl will triumph.

When is the last time you heard of a working girl triumphing?

They do it every day. They are executives, not “working girls.”

No, not those. This is about a real working girl. One who gets very little money or vacation time, who periodically rewards herself for life’s injustices by buying cream and charging underwear she’ll spend a year paying off.

All right, then. What is the story?

Are you sure you want to hear it? Apparently you are already quite shaken, to have found out that the wife, initially ordinary, is in fact extraordinary, and has competed in a beauty pageant and won a trip to Paris.

But this was to be a story about the working girl. What’s the scoop with her?

This is just the way the people in the office think: the boss wants to know what’s going on in his secretary’s mind, the secretary wonders if the mail boy is gay, the mail boy is cruising the elevator operator, and every day the working girl walks into this tense, strange situation. She does it because she needs the money, and also because it’s the way things are. It isn’t going to be much different wherever she works.

Details. Make the place seem real.

In the winter, when the light disappears early, the office has a very strange aura. The ficus trees cast shadows on the desks. The water in the watercooler looks golden—more like wine than water.

How many people are there?

There are four people typing in the main room, and there are three executives, who share an executive secretary. She sits to the left of the main room.

Which one is the working girl in love with?

Andrew Darby, the most recently hired executive. He has prematurely gray hair, missed two days of work when his dog didn’t pull through surgery, and was never drafted because of a deteriorating disc which causes him much pain, though it is difficult to predict when the pain will come on. Once it seemed to coincide with the rising of a bubble in the watercooler. The pain shot up his spine as though mimicking the motion of the bubble.

And he’s married?

We just finished discussing his wife.

He’s really married, right?

There are no tricks here. He’s been married for six years.

Is there more information about his wife?

No. You can find out what the working girl thinks of her, but as far as judging for yourself, you can’t, because she is in Paris. What good would it do to overhear a phone conversation between the wife and Andrew? None of us generalizes from phone conversations. Other than that, there’s only a postcard. It’s a close-up of a column, and she says on the back that she loves and misses him. That if love could be embodied in columns, her love for him would be Corinthian.

That’s quite something. What is his reaction to that?

He receives the postcard the same day his ad appears in the “personals” column. He has it in his pocket when he goes to laminate the ad, punch a hole in the plastic, insert a chain, and make a keyring of it.

Doesn’t he go through a bad moment?

A bit of one, but basically he is quite pleased with himself. He and Jeanette are going to lunch together. Over lunch, he gives her the keyring. She is slightly scandalized, amused, and touched. They eat sandwiches. He can’t sit in a booth because of his back. They sit at a table.

Ten years later, where is Andrew Darby?

Dead. He dies of complications following surgery. A blood clot that went to his brain.

Why does he have to die?

This is just reporting, now. In point of fact, he dies.

Is Jeanette still in touch with him when he dies?

She’s his wife. Married men do leave their wives. Andrew Darby didn’t have that rough a go of it. After a while, he and his former wife developed a fairly cordial relationship. She spoke to him on the phone the day he checked into the hospital.

What happened then?

At what point?

When he died.

He saw someone beckoning to him. But that isn’t what you mean. What happened is that Jeanette was in a cab on her way to the hospital, and when she got there, one of the nurses was waiting by the elevator. The nurse knew that Jeanette was on her way, because she came at the same time every day. Also, Andrew Darby had been on that same floor, a year or so before, for surgery that was successful. That nurse took care of him then, also. It isn’t true that the nurse you have one year will be gone the next.

This isn’t a story about the working girl anymore.

It is, because she went right on working. She worked during the marriage and for quite a few years after he died. Toward the end, she wasn’t working because she needed the money. She wanted the money, but that’s different from needing the money.

What kind of a life did they have together?

He realized that he had something of a problem with alcohol and gave it up. She kept her figure. They went to Bermuda and meant to return, but never did. Every year she reordered perfume from a catalogue she had taken from the hotel room in Bermuda. She tried to find another scent that she liked, but always ended up reordering the one she was so pleased with. They didn’t have children. He didn’t have children with his first wife either, so that by the end it was fairly certain that the doctor had been right, and that the problem was with Andrew, although he never would agree to be tested. He had two dogs in his life, and one cat. Jeanette’s Christmas present to him, the year he died, was a Rolex. He gave her a certificate that entitled her to twenty free tanning sessions and a monthly massage.

What was it like when she was a working girl?

Before she met him, or afterwards?

Before and afterwards.

Before, she often felt gloomy, although she entertained more in those days, and she enjoyed that. Her charge card bills were always at the limit, and if she had been asked, even at the time, she would have admitted that a sort of overcompensation was taking place. She read more before she met him, but after she met him he read the same books, and it was nice to have someone to discuss them with. She was convinced that she had once broken someone’s heart: a man she dated for a couple of years, who inherited his parents’ estate when they died. He wanted to marry Jeanette and take care of her. His idea was to commute into New York from the big estate in Connecticut. She felt that she didn’t know how to move comfortably into someone else’s life. Though she tried to explain carefully, he was bitter and always maintained that she didn’t marry him because she didn’t like the furniture.

Afterwards?

You’ve already heard some things about afterwards. Andrew had a phobia about tollbooths, so when they were driving on the highway, he’d pull onto the shoulder when he saw the sign for a tollbooth, and she’d drive through it. On the Jersey Turnpike, of course, she just kept the wheel. They knew only one couple that they liked equally well—they liked the man as well as they liked the woman, that is. They tended to like the same couples.

What was it like, again, in the office?

The plants and the watercooler.

Besides that.

That’s really going back in time. It would seem like a digression at this point.

But what about understanding the life of the working girl? She turned a corner, and it was fall. With a gigantic intake of breath, her feet lifted off the ground.

Explain.

Nothing miraculous happened, but still things did happen, and life changed. She lost touch with some friends, became quite involved in reading the classics. In Bermuda, swimming, she looked up and saw a boat and remembered very distinctly, and much to her surprise, that the man she had been involved with before Andrew had inherited a collection of ships in bottles from his great-great-grandfather. And that day, as she came out of the water, she cut her foot on something. Whatever it was was as sharp as glass, if it was not glass. And that seemed to sum up something. She was quite shaken. She and Andrew sat in the sand, and the boat passed by, and Andrew thought that it was the pain alone that had upset her.