Girls In 3-B, The (6 page)

"About ten bucks. Most of my money was home under the shelf paper in the closet." The others nodded. They kept their money under the shelf paper too, or in a dresser drawer. "I keep meaning to start a bank account." Annice said. They all meant to start bank accounts as soon as they had enough money saved up. It seemed silly to go into a bank with twenty or thirty dollars and go through all that red tape. "It wasn't just the money," Annice complained, "it was my good pigskin bag I got for Christmas and all the stuff in it. They took my books too. My Civil Government book I paid five dollars for at the bookstore."

"Well," Pat said, "it looks like you got some good out of it. You met a nice boy."

"That's doing it the hard way. There's plenty of nice boys in my classes. Anyhow I couldn't ever really care for Jackson
--
he's too dumb, he doesn't read anything but physics and history."

"Nobody's asking you to marry the boy. He might be fun to go out with even if he hasn't got any money."

Children,
Barby thought in dull silent scorn.
They don't know what they're talking about.
She had nibbled at her supper, trying to eat because it was Pat's week to cook and it hurt Pat's feelings to have anything left on the plates. No matter whose turn it was, they had hamburgers or hot dogs two or three times a week, with frozen peas or canned corn, and there was never any grocery money left at the end of the week. This led all of them to spend too much money on lunch.

Her head ached. She hadn't eaten all day. That morning while she was spooning instant coffee into a cup. she had seen from the corner of her eye a small scuttling brown spot that could only be a roach. She had bent to look, but there was nothing under the gas range but some wisps of dust and a forgotten book of matches. Pat had said, so what
--
be thankful it's not a bedbug, everybody has roaches. But Barby had poured her coffee down the sink, feeling a little sick, and had left for work without breakfast. Then when she had reached the stair landing Rocco had been lounging there, not doing anything, obviously just waiting for her.

He had caught her by the arm. "When you're coming down to see me?" Too frightened to answer, she had twisted away before one of the other tenants could come down and see them together. At lunch time she had sat, sickly, with a bowl of soup in front of her, thinking,
What am I going to do? how can I go back there?
It had occurred to her finally that she could stop by for Pat and help her carry the groceries home from the Hi-Lo, a good enough pretext.

But she couldn't dodge him forever. There was tomorrow.

She still wasn't sure how she had fallen, or been pushed, into moving here. During the two days she had spent in bed with a migraine her one resolution, the thought she had clutched to her all through the dizziness and skull-splitting pain, was to stay away from this place. But when she was up again and the girls demanded details, she had found nothing to say except, vaguely, that she didn't like the place. The rent was reasonable, the space adequate, the furniture not too bad. "We can't be fussy," Annice had reminded her, a trifle crossly. "Apartments are hard to find right now and rents are terrible. What was the matter with it, anyhow
?
"

"Oh, I guess it's all right."

She couldn't tell them. There are some things you can't decently tell anybody. She pushed the memory well into the back of her mind, along with that earlier memory, and tried to forget it was there. If she told the truth
--
but the thought of their startled eyes and questions made that impossible ; and she couldn't think of a good convincing lie. She packed her clothes silently, with death in her heart.

Now she sat on the davenport pretending to read
Life
while Annice and Pat talked about some fool boy.
I
must have been crazy,
she thought.
I
could have said there were rats or bugs or something.
Now it was too late. The other girls were pleased with the apartment. It was big enough, with only a little crowding. There was a supermarket in the next block.
We'll be here forever,
she thought desperately, feeling the walls close in around her like a prison.

I tried to tell him. Just like I tried to tell
him,
before. They're stronger than women.
She rubbed her forehead. The colors of the Matisse reproduction Annice had bought at the Art Institute were melting and running together. She struggled to her feet, noting dully that her arms and legs ached. "I'm going to bed. I think maybe I'm coming down with flu or something."

"You better sleep on the davenport," Annice said. "That way the rest of us won't catch it." Her voice was kind, but she wasn't really paying attention; she was lost in her own thoughts.
It’s true,
she thought,
I
could never take a man seriously if he didn't understand how I feel about really important things. There's no reason I can't go out with Jackson, though. If he asks me.
The notion that he might not ask her made her feel unreasonably sad. She took her red leather notebook down from the shelf where they kept their books and turned the pages. The poems, neatly printed with wide margins and curly capitals, didn't read as well as usual. They sounded like echoes of other poems she had read. She put the book back and decided that since she didn't have a date and wasn't sleepy it would be a good time to wash all her underwear.

She gathered slips and panties from the floor, the dresser and closet, and ran warm water into the bathroom basin, picturing a series of long confidential talks with Jackson Carter that would bring him around to a deeper understanding of the finer things in life and finally to a lasting romance.

Pat got out of the bathroom so she could get in. Pat had taken a long steamy shower and had washed her hair and set it in bobby pins, tying a green net cap with bows over it; her nails were still damp with polish, she had shaved her legs, and she reeked of Aphrodisia and lotion. She was wearing pink nylon panties. "Late date?"

"No, but I didn't have anything else to do, so I thought I might as well get cleaned up." This was new for Pat, whose grooming had always been, to say the least, casual. She said, "Shut your mouth before a fly walks in. Didn't you ever see anybody take a bath before?" But she sounded good-natured.

This was the best part of the day,
she thought, crawling into the double bed that took up most of the space in the bedroom and stretching voluptuously. Even better than the moment when he came into the office, smiling, and greeted her. The actual daily meeting was always marred by her own shortcomings
--
she had a run in her stocking, or her hands were smudged by carbon, or something. The sight of him was enough to strike her wordless, even though she had made up a dazzling conversation the night before.

Now she liked to go to bed while her mind was still alert and think up endless dazzling dreams of he-said-tome and I-said-to-him. So far she had never reached the final intimacy; maybe that was the voice of conscience preserving her from sin. Although goodness knows her thoughts after a date with Johnny Cutler would have disturbed her mother, not to mention the parish priest. So far all of her imaginary encounters with Blake Thomson began with his arrival at the office in the morning and ended with the scene where he leaned over her and said, "Darling Pat, did you think I thought of you only as a typist? I've been watching you for a long, long time."

So far she hadn't been able to picture him anywhere except in the office.

Wonder what kind of shave stuff he uses. Mixed with tobacco--I love to see a man smoke a pipe and that indefinable male smell. He's older than I thought.
She had sneaked his dossier out of the file one day when everyone else was at lunch and had devoured all its details. A Dartmouth man. Never been married. Yet.
Darling Pat, you are the first girl I ever really loved
.

She fell happily asleep, her face shining with cold cream.

Annice felt too brisk for bed. Damn the silly college, she thought, double-damn whoever swiped my stuff. But she hummed, rinsing out her nylon pants and her best bra
--
padded, but not too much. There was something about having a man in your life, almost any kind of a man, even if you weren't going to get serious about him. So far she had never really loved anybody, and it bothered her
--
because how can you be a great poet until you know the splendor and tragedy of a great love
?

She rubbed and wrung as her mother would have done, inspecting each item sharply before she hung it over the shower rod.

Barby was having trouble falling asleep. She turned and twisted, wide-eyed in the dark. Everything was closing in on her. She was trapped. There was no place where you could hide and be safe. At the store this afternoon one of the salesmen had asked for a date, and the awful thing was that even though she was in a turmoil about Rocco she halfway wanted to say yes. At the same time the thought of being near a man
--
any man
--
filled her with horror. There was this feeling that she was powerless. She wasn't sure what she had said to young Mr. Cohen. For a moment, looking at his pleasant young face, she had seen Rocco's dark features and powerful arms
--
and behind him, the clear profile and burning eyes of her father.

She wanted to get out of bed and run
--
but not past those stairs, knowing what peril lurked beyond their turning. She wanted desperately to run to someone who would open comforting arms and take her in and shelter her. But there was no one.

She stared at the oblong of light moving across the wall as a car passed down the street.

Annice was walking around in the bathroom, singing, hanging a week's accumulation of laundry over the tub to drip. Barby could hear drawers being pulled out and slammed shut, and the click of the medicine-chest door. Every sound was magnified in her ears. She sat up. "For Christ sake, what are you doing in there? Why don't you do your washing in the daytime?"

Annice looked around the door, her face blank with surprise. "I'm sorry. Am I keeping you kids awake
?
"

Barby glared at her. Then she rolled over and hid her face in the pillow, too miserable to cry.

Poor kid,
Annice thought,
she's working too hard. Or maybe it's the old curse.
She pulled the bathroom door shut and ran clear water into the basin, too intent on her own affairs to be in any way concerned.

Professor King's party was really getting under way. All of the chairs were occupied, some by more than one person, and four boys sat wedged together on the davenport, balancing plates and beer glasses on their knees. Half a dozen people were on the floor, the boys sprawled out, all arms and legs, the girls with arms wrapped around knees. When the door opened, the volume of talk rushed out and hit the newcomers in the face. Someone had left a lighted cigarette on the table; there was an acrid smell of scorched varnish. Someone else had upset a stein of beer in a girl's lap. Everyone was having a fine time.

Annice's misgivings vanished. She hadn't wanted to come
--
a poetry reading sponsored by an English professor didn't sound very exciting. Not what she had pictured in her dreams of studio parties, the great world of people who wrote and did Interesting Things. Now she was glad she had come. She threw back her shoulders and took a deep breath.

The thin bearded boy at her feet said lazily, "Hi. I'm Alan. Who're you?"

"I'm nobody," Annice said smiling. He turned his back on her, then turned around again so she could get the full impact of his sneer. "Emily Dickinson yet. She's reactionary. You ought to read Henry Miller and learn a new idiom."

"I disagree," the dark man beside the fireplace said. "Emily's in the vanguard. You kids are old-fashioned. But then," he said sadly, "your whole damn generation's reactionary."

"You're quite right." The popeyed girl pushed up her pink-rimmed glasses. "We're still hanging on to the standards formed in the Twenties, the Golden Age of revolt. Kerouac says
--
"

Annice was torn between pleasure and self-doubt. This was what she had longed for back on the farm, listening rebelliously to the supper-table talk about the price of soybeans. Nobody was interested in ideas there, and she had to go around in a fine poetic isolation, scorning her relatives and neighbors. Here, ideas swirled on the air almost visibly, like the smoke that hung above the heads of the talkers or the body heat that made the room uncomfortably warm even though the outside was cool. Two small logs smoldered in the fireplace. She walked across the room and held out her hands to the blaze. Jack stood against the wall watching her progress, unwilling to risk stepping on any outstretched hand.

She said wistfully, "I love this fireplace."

"A pretty act," the bearded boy said. He unfolded his lean length from the floor and moved to join her. He had bold eyes; he looked at her as though he could see through the peasant skirt and the padded bra. She put a hand to her chest to hide her innocent deceits, then dropped it, angry. "You're rude," she said.

"Rude
--
of course I am. There's too goddam much fake politeness in the world. Intelligent people have a moral obligation to be rude."

She hated him. He was arrogant and unkind. His eyes were clear and bright, and his chin was firm under the arty beat-generation beard. Suddenly, returning his unwinking stare, she wanted him to like her. More than anything in the world she wanted him to put his arms around her and kiss her, instead of looking so superior. Her desire frightened her.

One of the boys said, "Old stuff, Alan. That's reaction against the reaction against conformity." Annice accepted a plate and glass from a pleasant fortyish woman who had too much bottom to be wearing toreador pants. The hostess, probably, or a faculty wife called in for the evening. She gave Annice a friendly wink and went away again, leaving her to balance the refreshments and clutch her leather notebook at the same time.