Anybody Can Do Anything (7 page)

The CPA and the liaison man were very nice but they kept Mary and me so busy we never did get to finish “Sandra Surrenders” and they insisted on taking sides in our fights so that they were seldom on speaking terms with each other and one or the other was always not on speaking terms with one or the other of us.

Mary and I had many violent fights, sometimes even slapping each other, but we made up instantly and it was most disconcerting to come back from lunch and find the fight of the morning still hovering around the office like stale smoke and the accountant and the liaison man wanting to take sides and talk about us, one to the other.

They thought I really meant it when I screamed at Mary, “It’s no wonder you’re an old maid, for twenty-five years you’ve always gotten your own way and you think you can boss everybody!” and Mary screamed back, “It’s better to be twenty-five years old and unmarried than to shuffle through your old marriage licenses like a deck of cards,” or “You haven’t done a stroke of work in this office since I came—all you do is smoke and order me around like a slave,” and “I will continue to order you around like a slave as long as you act like a slave, think like a slave and smell like a slave.” By the fall of 1932, the depression was very bad and we were sure that the lumbermen weren’t going to put up with Mr. Chalmers much longer. Now I grew more and more conscious of the aimlessness and sadness of the people on the streets, of the Space for Rent signs, marking the sudden death of businesses, that had sprung up over the city like white crosses on a battlefield, and I lifted up myself each day timidly and with dread expecting to find the dark despairing mask of unemployment staring at me.

Mary was so unworried about it all that she took two
hours for lunch, another hour or two for coffee, and when Mr. Chalmers finally took her to task, she told him that the interesting part of his job was over and she guessed she’d leave and sell advertising.

Then for a few terrible weeks, until one of the lumbermen sent over his girl, I had to stop dusting and filling pens and take Mr. Chalmers’ volumes of dictation. He mumbled so and used so many enormous and obscure words that I could never read my notes and had to bring them home at night for Mary to transcribe. She was always able to read my shorthand but finally doing both our jobs must have palled for she told me that I should quit Chalmers and sell advertising. With great tact she said that red-haired people were not meant for dull office work and instead of bawling because I couldn’t learn shorthand, why didn’t I use some of my many other talents.

I said that considering that Mr. Chalmers had put up with me this long and had paid my way to nightschool, I thought I should stay until the end. And I did, in spite of Mr. Chalmers’ telling me many times that the depression was all my fault, the direct result of inferior people like me wearing silk stockings and thinking they were as good as people like him.

One day my brother Cleve came in to take me to lunch and caught the tail end of one of these little talks. “The only way to get rid of the poor is to line them up against a wall and shoot them,” said kind old Mr. Chalmers, chewing his cigar. “I feel the same way about sons of bitches like you,” said my tall, handsome, red-haired brother smiling in the doorway. Chalmers went into his office and slammed the door shut. Cleve and I went to lunch.

Two days later, the office closed and its closing, like the death of an invalid who has hovered for long wearisome months at the brink of death, brought relief rather than sorrow. I cleaned out my desk, throwing away the accumulation of half-filled bottles of hand lotion, packages of personal letters, dried-up bottles of nail polish, used cakes of soap, broken-toothed combs and tobaccoy lipsticks, which littered my bottom drawer, and wondered how I would say good-bye to Mr. Chalmers. For, in spite of his holding me personally responsible for the depression, I was fond of him, knew that his job had been in the nature of his last stand and worried about what was to become of him.

The closing of Mr. Webster’s office meant merely that Webster would be on his own instead of working for a big corporation, and we had celebrated the occasion with club sandwiches and champagne. I didn’t expect anything like that from Chalmers, who had chosen to ignore the repeated warnings from the lumbermen or notice the fact that all the office force but me had left for other jobs, but I did expect him, that last day, to admit that it was all over.

He didn’t though. At ten-thirty he came slamming and banging into the office, rang the buzzer furiously and demanded that I call Joe the bootlegger and order him a case of Canadian Club. Old Custer was all alone but he was still commanding, still shooting.

I dialed Joe’s number and wondered if being out of business would affect our credit. Joe’s wife answered. I asked for Joe. She said, “He can’t come to the phone. He’s dead.” I said that I was very sorry and she said, “That’s okay, honey, we all gotta go sometime. What did you wish?” I said, “I want to order a case of Canadian Club.” She said, “All we got now, honey, is the alcohol and the labels.” I wondered if she also had the sand and seaweed with which Joe used to adorn his bottles and offer as final proof that it was the real stuff brought from Canada by water. I told her that I’d talk to Chalmers and call her back and she said, “O.K., honey, I’ll be here all day.”

I told Chalmers about Joe and he said, “Humph!” put on his hat and left and, though I waited and waited, he never came back. At a little after one I took my package of personal belongings and went home. I never saw Mr. Chalmers again. I called his club and left word for him to call me but he didn’t and when I called again I learned he had checked out and left no forwarding address. Lumber was over.

5: “Nobody’s Too Dull or Too Short for My Sister”

Most females between the ages of thirteen and forty-five feel that being caught at home dateless, especially on a Friday or Saturday night, is a shameful thing like having athlete’s foot. I used to harbor the same silly notion and many’s the lie I’ve told to anyone tactless enough to call up at nine-thirty and ask me what I was doing. “What am I doing?” I’d say, brushing the fudge crumbs off the front of my pajamas and marking the place in my book. “Oh, just sitting here sipping champagne and smoking opium. My date had trouble with his car.”

Which is why, now that I’ve had time to heal, I’m really grateful to Mary for deciding that along with making me self-supporting, she would use me as a proving ground for dates.

The first time, however, that I heard Mary, who has a great love for people, any people, and is not at all critical, which qualities though laudable in a friend are perfectly awful in a matchmaker, say, “I can’t go but Betty will,” I protested.

Mother said, “Remember, Betsy, a rolling stone . . .” Mary, always quick to seize an opportunity, repeated, “Yes, remember a rolling stone.” Only I could tell, after just a few dates, that her real interpretation of the old saying was,
“Come out from under that stone and no matter how mossy, you’re a date for Betty.”

As “I can’t go but Betty will” became Mary’s stock answer to any phone call, so “Oh, please God, not
him!”
was my usual reaction.

Mary launched my business and social career the same day. The business career with mining, the social career with Worthington Reed, who when he called and asked Mary to lunch was told, “I’ve already got a date but you can take my sister, Betty.” I was surprised and terribly thrilled when, just before twelve, Worthington appeared in a big wrinkled tweed suit, pipe and raised eyebrow, and said, “Come on, you.” He was very handsome and because of his dress, which was so casual it included a few spots and a hole in the heel of one sock, I decided immediately that he was also very intellectual. “Ah, this is the life,” I thought ecstatically as I locked the office door. “A job, the city and a brilliant man to take me to lunch.” Worthington took my arm as we left the elevator in the basement of the building and I swallowed uncontrollably.

The restaurant too was romantic. Dark woodwork, brick floors, real leather on the seats and backs of the booths, rich warm smells of toasted rolls, roast beef, wiener snitchzel and coffee, prosperous customers who looked as if they took long lunch hours; and dim lights that hid the darns in the tablecloths and the shaking of my hands as I lit cigarette after cigarette and tried desperately to assemble enough courage to cast the first stone into the deep pool of silence between Worthington and me.

Frantically I searched around in my mind for something to say. Something sophisticated enough to go with wrinkled tweeds and a pipe. Worthington, who was slouched comfortably back in the booth, seemed very relaxed. He pulled on his pipe and looked over my head at the people entering and leaving the restaurant. Finally, desperately, I said, “My
this looks like real leather.” “Uppa, uppa, uppa,” said Worthington’s pipe. “It feels like real leather too,” I said, running my hand over the seat. Worthington said nothing. “It smells like real leather, too,” I said, leaning over and sniffing. Worthington raised his eyebrow but said nothing.

Some people took the booth next to us. Their shoulders were wet and their faces were rosy and shiny with rain. “Why, it’s raining outside,” I said, as though it hadn’t been for the past five months. Worthington looked at me quizzically. His eyes were a clear French blue with a black ring around the iris. There was a small brown mole in the corner of the right eye. His eyelashes were black and silky. When it seemed suddenly as if he had only one eye, one big eye with two irises, I realized that I had been staring into his eyes and blushed and looked away.

What could I talk about? What besides real leather? I tried to recall some of the brilliant witty things Mary’s intellectual friends had said over the weekend but all I could remember was one remark made by an odd boy, who lay around on the floor under the furniture with his eyes closed hating everything. He had said, “Oh God, not Bizet! He’s so nauseatingly rococo.”

“Do you care for Bizet?” I asked Worthington hopefully. “Biz-who?” he said through his pipe, as the waitress brought rolls and butter. “Bizet,” I mumbled, afraid that I had pronounced it wrong, that it should have been Busy, Bizette, or Byzay. Worthington didn’t answer so I took a roll and had just started to butter it when suddenly he reached across the table, took a firm grip on my hand, looked into my eyes and said, “Do you have any sexual desires?” Needless to say, for the rest of that lunch hour I never did go back to old rococo Bizet.

“What you need is fun!” Mary said as she hung up the phone after telling somebody named Clara that of course I’d love to go dancing with her Cousin Bill.

“Not when your idea of fun is fighting for my virtue in a pitch-black taxi cab while trying to figure out the German for CUT THAT OUT!”

“Oh, Hans!” Mary said. “Europeans don’t have the same attitude toward sex that we do. Anyway, he’s gone back to Germany and he is a wonderful dancer.”

“He’s a wonderful dancer if you don’t mind having your bust pinched to music.”

Mary said, “Hans was simply charming at the Andersons’. He’s a count and one of the Hapsburgs, you know.”

I said, “Mary, there were one hundred and fifty people at the Andersons’ cocktail party and I’ll bet half of them have Hans’ fingerprints on them some place. Do you know that he tried to pull my blouse down and kiss my bare shoulder in a
movie.”

Mary said, “Oh, Betty. That’s European. They’re always kissing each other’s shoulders. You’ve seen the
Merry Widow.”

I said, “I’m not going tonight. You’ve never seen Clara’s Cousin Bill.”

Mary said, “Betty, you know Clara, and she and her husband are going. Please, Betsy, just this once and I promise I’ll never get you another blind date. Anyway, I only got you a date with Hans because Helen told me that he was going to offer you a wonderful job.”

“He did,” I said. “Shooting wild goats in Austria. I was to tally the kill and to carry the one sleeping bag.”

Mary said, “Anyway, Bill is an American.”

I said, “How tall is he?”

Mary said, “He’s twenty-seven and sells advertising.”

I said, “How tall is he?”

Mary said, “I forgot to ask Clara about that but she says he has a sense of humor.”

“I don’t care how funny he is,” I said. “I’m sick of looking down into some little dandruffy part.”

Mary said, “Betty, you know that some of the dates I’ve gotten you have turned out all right. You’ve even had a wonderful time occasionally. Please go tonight, I’ve already told Clara you would and you’ll never heal those wounds sitting around home brooding.”

“I wasn’t brooding,” I said. “I was studying shorthand and I’m not worried about those old wounds, my idea is to keep from getting any new ones.”

They came for me on the dot of seven. Clara, a little blonde dressed in yellow, was so sallow, so narrow and so flat she looked like a wax bean but she was sweet and very anxious for us all to have a good time. Her husband, Carmen, a large gray real estate man, had simplified the English language to just two words—”poop” and “crap.” He used them as common nouns and proper nouns and then by merely adding “ed” and “y” he had verbs, adjectives and adverbs with which to describe in detail, real estate transactions, the resort where he and Clara spent their honeymoon, the “home” they were building, the music and decorations of the nightclub where we went—just everything. For punctuation he used nudges and winks. It gave his conversation a static sound like the Morse code.

Cousin Bill was exactly my height, five feet, seven inches, but we weren’t twins because I had on high heels and five feet of him was torso, and his legs looked as if they’d been meant for somebody else.

Bill wore a turquoise blue suit, little pools of spit in the corners of his mouth and a big pompadour smoothed greasily over a heavy tangle of hair, like a tarpaulin thrown over a brush pile. I thought he was the funniest-looking thing I’d ever seen but I didn’t feel like laughing.

Clara and Carmen thought he was funny acting and doubled up convulsively when he pulled the tablecloth over our laps and shouted at me, “Hey, baby, no fair, you’ve got most of the sheet,” or pretended one short leg was shorter
than the other short leg when we danced or clapped his hands with the dirty fingernails together and yelled, “Hey, Garsong,” to the waiter. After we had danced, we had Chinese food and Cousin Bill further convulsed Clara and Carmen by yelling, “Pass the bug juice, Baby!” or “Who’ll have another piece of sea gull,” or calling the waiters “Chow-mein” or “Foo Young.”

Louise’s husband’s buddy (Louise had gone to high school with Mary and me but I didn’t remember her and didn’t care) was tall and handsome, had beautiful white teeth, dimples, dried-blood-colored shoes with sharp pointy toes and a yellow roadster. He took me to a country club for dinner and as he picked tidbits off my plate with his fork, told me that his Mom was his best girl and would always wear his fraternity pin but he thought a bachelor should have a normal sex life. I told him that if he expected to have a normal sex life he’d have to get that fraternity pin off Mom and dangle it around a little and he said, “Betty, my dear, you’re far too cynical for your age.”

I learned during those trying times when Mary was getting me dates that most bachelors wanted a normal sex life even under the most abnormal conditions. Some were more eager about sex than others, especially Navy Officers who had
been
at sea.

Once Mary got our sister Dede, who is very small, a New Year’s Eve date with a tiny little Navy Officer. We warned her against regular Navy procedure and her date, like a true little dinger to tradition, immediately told her she looked tired and would she like to rest in his great big old empty hotel room.

Dede told us about it at the nightclub where we convened and when we all laughed, the little Navy Officer became so incensed he crawled under the table and bit the leg of a woman at the
next
table. The woman screamed and her escort, who happened to be a bootlegger, threw back his
coat, disclosing two little guns, and said, “Who done that?” “A member of your United States Navy,” said Dede. “And I think it’s pretty rotten that he has to go to another table to find a leg he can bite,” said Mary’s date, a captain in the Marine Corps.

Occasionally Mary would get caught in one of her own traps and for a short time thereafter would be slightly cagey about lonely friends of second cousins of switchboard operators in the offices of former customers.

One such happy occasion was the arrival in town of two young mining engineers, friends of Mr. Webster’s, who had been in South America too long. Mr. Webster called Mary at Mr. Chalmers’ where we were both working and asked her if we would have dinner and go dancing with his friends. Mary said yes and they could pick us up at seven-thirty at home.

At six or thereabouts, we were sitting in our bathrobes in the breakfast nook drinking coffee and complaining to Mother about how unfairly we were treated everywhere, when the doorbell rang and Alison came out to the kitchen and said that there were two funny-looking men at the door asking for Mary and me.

We went to the door and there were our dates—one with a tiny head like a shriveled brown coconut—one with a huge white melon-shaped dome; both in Norfolk jackets belted in the back, and both with pipes. It hadn’t taken as long on the trolley as they thought it would, haha, and they guessed they were a little early. Mary and I asked them in, left Mother to entertain them and went upstairs to get dressed.

While we dressed, we sent spies downstairs to pick up tidbits of information and report. “They’re going to take you on the streetcar!” Alison reported in a loud voice. “Oh, God, no,” Mary groaned as she fastened the brilliant buckle on the belt of her long green dinner dress. “Was it the
Incas who shriveled heads?” Dede asked as she came upstairs to report that little head’s name was Chester and big head’s Colvin. “Mother likes them, I can tell,” Alison reported. “They’re talking about Mexico and she’s asked them for dinner on Sunday.”

“If she likes them so well she can go out with them,” Mary said. “I’m not going
anywhere
on the
streetcar!”

I said, “Oh, yes, you are. You’re going to get a taste of what you’ve been doing to me for months and months.”

We went but not on the streetcar because Mary called a cab, but we did go to the Hotel and I drew Colvin with the big head and I guess he’d been in South America for a very long time because we’d been dancing for quite a while before he caught on that the man is supposed to put his arm around the girl—not vice versa. Mary said Chester held her the right way but kept springing up and down on her toes as if she were a diving board and anyway he had bad breath.

At ten-thirty Mary looked at her watch, shrieked and said, “Mother will die if we aren’t home in fifteen minutes,” called a taxi and we jumped in and charged it to Mr. Chalmers.

Sunday morning we were delighted to wake up and find four inches of snow on the ground. “No trolleys, no dull little miners!” we thought exultantly. By four-thirty the snow was almost six inches thick, the house was filled with our friends and Mary and I were giving a demonstration of Chester’s and Colvin’s dancing techniques, when there were thundering raps, the front door opened, and there, snow-covered and eager, were Chester and Colvin. They had
hiked
out from town. “Nothing to it,” they said, stamping the snow off their big laced hiking boots. “Often hiked sixty or seventy miles in South America.”

“Any chance of your getting lost?” our gentle little sister Dede asked.

“Unh, unh,” said Colvin and Chester simultaneously. “We can find our way anywhere.”

When they left about eleven-thirty, Cleve gave them explicit instructions to follow on the return trip, even kindly drawing them a map and explaining that he’d made a couple of minor changes in the regular route—changes involving a detour over the ice floes in the Bering Sea and along the entire coast of the Pribilof Islands. The last we ever saw of them they were standing in the snow under a street light studying Cleve’s map.