In Milton Lumky Territory (1984) Page 4

  “Where’s your needle and thread?” he said.

  She lifted her head. “What?” she said slowly, squinting at him to see who it was. Her movements were retarded, as if she had been almost asleep. “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.” Reaching down, she brushed her fingers across the ground at her feet. “I dropped it,” she said.

  As he approached, she found her needle, held it up and inspected it, and then resumed her darning. The bright midday sunlight made her frown; lines scoured her forehead, and her eyes, fixed on the dazzling sock, became almost shut.

  “I have a lot of stuff for you,” he said, balancing his armload.

  Again she raised her head.

  “From your office.” He held out the armload.

  “Did Mrs. de Lima give them to you?” Susan said.

  “That woman who was there,” he said. “Middle-aged, brown hair.”

  “I told her I wasn’t feeling well,” Susan said. “I really ought to be down there. I haven’t been down there more than one day in the last month.”

  “Don’t go down if you’re not feeling well,” he said.

  “I feel okay,” she said. “I just can’t bring myself to go down there. It’s so depressing. I’m just not cut out to be a businesswoman. I used to teach school.”

  He nodded at that.

  Susan sighed. “Put them inside. The checks and the mail. What’s that big packet?”

  “A manuscript.” He related to her the details that Mrs. de Lima had asked him to pass on.

  Susan put down her lap of socks and got to her feet. “I know what she wants; she wants me to type it here at home. She knows I have an Underwood electric here. I suppose I should. What’s the matter with me? I shouldn’t make her do all the work … she’s really been very good about it, the last month. Come on in. Excuse me for being so slow … I can’t seem to focus on anything today.” She disappeared on inside the house, and he followed.

  The back porch, with its laundry tubs and shelves, was cool. Susan had gone on into a yellow, brightly-decorated kitchen, and then on along a hall and into a front room. When he arrived there he found her collapsed in a deep, old-fashioned easy chair, her arms resting on its fuzzy, black-fabric arms, her head back, eyes fixed on the ceiling.

  Setting his armload down on a table he said, “I was surprised when she gave me this stuff.”

  “Why?” Susan said, her eyes shut.

  “She doesn’t know me.”

  “Poor Zoe,” Susan said. “She’s a nut. She trusts everybody. She’s as bad as I am. Neither of us have any business sense. I don’t know how we ever got started.”

  “Anyhow you’re making a living,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “We’re not making a living - Bruce? Is that your first name? The thing that depresses me is that now is when I really can use a source of income. And that’s what it isn’t.”

  He asked, “Who owns the toys I saw out back?”

  “Taffy,” she said. “My daughter. She’s in school. Second grade.”

  He had an impulse, at that moment, to tell her that she had been his teacher. The message almost came out of him; he stammered a few words and then said instead, “If you were a teacher, why don’t you educate her at home? That seems ideal to me.”

  “The group,” Susan said. “A child needs training to prepare him to live with a group. Would you like some coffee?” Arising from her chair she started out of the room.

  “No, thanks,” he mumbled. The impulse passed, and, strangely, no intention to tell her remained, no desire at all. Probably he would never get around to telling her; the subject had closed itself for good, leaving nothing behind. Except that he knew. He remembered her, the young woman teacher of those days, who had been there, one morning when they arrived.

  In those days, he thought, she probably was twenty-three or -four. Good God, he thought. The age I am now.

  Thinking that, he tried to picture her as she had actually been in those days, not as she had looked to him a fifth grade student eleven years old. The image was unclear as it could possibly be. He could shut his eyes and imagine various cronies of the times: Nigger Lips Tate, Bud McVae, Earl Smith, Louis Selkirk, the kid in the apartment house across the street who had pantsed him one afternoon in plain sight of everyone, the girl who sat across from him in class and who had the long black hair and whom Gene Scanlan had written the note to, for him, which old Mrs. Jaffey, their former teacher, had happened on and - thank God - been unable to read. All that was still visible to him, but when he thought about her, about Miss Reuben, he saw only a tight-faced woman, with angry eyes and pale, twitching lips, who stood very tall with her arms folded, at the front of the room, wearing a blue suit with huge buttons like campaign badges, only white. And the carrying-power of her voice, especially on the playground during recess; she had stood up on the ramp by the door to the building supervising them, wearing a heavy coat over her shoulders. She had come out to Idaho from Florida, and she was not accustomed to the cold. In the winter and first months of spring she had shivered and complained, even to them, and her face had been drawn and pinched, her lips tucked in almost out of sight. In class she talked constantly about Florida and how wonderful the climate there was, the oranges and lemons, the beaches. They had all listened. They were obliged to.

  From the first day, he had been frightened of her. All of them had seen that she was a mean, intense young woman, simmering with strength, quite different from old Mrs. Jaffey, who had been ill and who had gone downstairs to the nurse one day, in the middle of the afternoon, and who had not come back. For months Mrs. Jaffey had complained of weariness and fever. After she had left the room, the children began screaming and hurling erasers. They had a fine time until the Principal appeared and hushed them up. And then, a few days later, they had arrived at their classroom to find Miss Reuben.

  Mrs. Jaffey had been the oldest teacher at the Garret A. Hobart Grammar School, and none of the other teachers had gotten on with her very well. She had intended to retire at the end of the semester anyhow. She was sixty-eight years old. According to Mr. Hillings the Principal she had taught at the school when it first opened up, forty-one years ago, in 1904.

  He, Skip Stevens, had gotten along swell with Mrs. Jaffey. In fact, she had supervised his election to Class President, which entitled him to hold forth at assemblies in the name of Fifth Grade, plus honorary powers such as deciding when to water the Fifth Grade Vegetable Garden in back of the school. At that time he had been a beefy, large boy, with red hair and freckles, good at kickball during recess, the first out of the cafeteria at lunch time and onto the playing field.

  Now, looking back, he realized that he had been a bully. Since he had outweighed the other boys, it had been a natural role; he did not feel guilt. Somebody had to be the bully, at that age.

  As far as Mrs. Jaffey went, during her last months she had become too infirm and inobservant to bother anyone. By the time she had given up and gone downstairs to the nurse, he had had the run of the room. One day he had started a fire in the clockroom. And once, when Mrs. Jaffey had left to go to the teachers’ washroom, he had dumped the wastebasket onto her desk.

  Susan, re-emerging from the kitchen, holding an aluminum coffee pot, said, “Bruce, do you have your car? There’s no milk. I wonder if I could talk you into going down and getting a carton of milk. Here.” She sat down the coffee pot and went over to pick up her purse from the living room sofa. Handing him a fifty-cent piece she said, “There’s a grocery store down about four blocks, on the corner. What happened about you car wax? Did you get that cleared up?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I closed the deal.” He did not accept the fifty-cent piece. But he started toward the front door.

  “And when do you have to go back to Reno?”

  “This evening,” he said.

  “Oh good,” she said. “Then you don’t have to leave right away.”

  “I’ll be right back,” he said, opening the door and going out onto the p
orch.

  As he drove off, away from the house, he wondered to himself why he did not mind doing this. Errands, he thought. But it meant he could do something for her.

  That pleased him.

  Should it? he asked himself. Should I want to do something for her? A woman I feared … a young lady teacher who bawled me out, humiliated me in front of the class. Perhaps, he thought, I am re-entering the pattern. Obedience. Slavery. The inequality of childhood …

  But he did not feel chained, compulsively following orders from her. He got a kick out of it; driving along in his Merc, searching for the grocery store, he felt important. Useful. To be depended on.

  WHEN HE ARRIVED back at the house, with the carton of milk, he found her in the living room. She had a fountain pen out, and was signing checks, grim-faced, with her lips drawn tightly together. That expression was stong in his memory: the tight, fierce resentment on her face. The lines crossing her forehead. She had put a shawl-like sweater over her shoulders, unbuttoned - a loose grandmotherish pink sweater, for warmth. The living room seemed cool to him, too. Dark and quiet and out of the sun. During his absence she had shut off the radio; the dance music no longer played. Without it, the house seemed older, more serious and sturdy. In her sweater she, too, seemed older. She had put shoes on, not the ones he had noticed in the yard, but a pair of saddle shoes. And white cotton bobby socks.

  “Does your discount house sell typewriters?” she asked, without looking up. “Or did I ask you that.”

  He carried the carton of milk into the kitchen. In addition to it he had bought a couple of bottles of Lucky Lager beer and a bag of cheese-flavored crackers. “We carry a few lines of portables,” he said. “No office models or electrics.”

  Pushing a piece of folded-up shiny paper toward him she said, “See what you think of this.”

  He read it over. It was an ad for a portable that used the new carbon ribbon.

  “The salesmen come in,” Susan said. “They start giving us all the verbiage … honestly, the way they push the retailer around. Loading them up.”

  “You have to fight back,” he said.

  “We sell a few used machines. We just don’t have enough money to stock portables. If they’d give them to us on consignment … does it tell how much they want for this one?”

  He saw no price on the ad, either wholesale or retail. “No,” he said.

  “Thanks for getting the milk,” she said. Arising, she shut the checkbook, stuck the fountain pen away, and started past him. But then she halted, directly in front of him and very close to him, so that she breathed up into his face. For the first time he realized that she was much shorter than he. To talk to him while standing so close she had to look almost straight up. It gave her an imploring manner, as if she were begging him for something. “How can we make any profit if we don’t have any money to start out with? All we can do is meet the bills that come in for gas and lights. The Idaho Power Company really has us. And the paper and carbon paper we use -of course, we get it at cost. But still.” Standing in front of him, petitioning him, she seemed not only small, but bony and cold as well. Under her sweater her shoulders pulled forward, as if she were shivering. And all the time she kept her eyes fixed on his face.

  He had never had an opportunity to see her this close up. It broke apart his memory of her. For one thing, he could tell that his life-long impression of her physical strength was erroneous; she had no more than any other woman, and he had always recognized that by and large, most women were delicate and even somewhat frail. And it seemed to him that she recognized it, too. But no doubt she always had. She had appeared mean and strong to them because first of all they had been so small, and, in addition, she had been angry at them, and it has been her job to terrify and badger and impress them. That was why the school board had chosen her; they needed a teacher that could keep the children in hand. Outside of her job, she had probably been like this even then. Yes, he thought, when he had later on delivered the paper to her house he had one day seen inside and noticed tiny china teacups on a table in the dining room. She had been serving tea to lady friends. It had not jibed with his image of her. So his image had always been false.

  She padded past him, across the carpet, her shoes making no sound. “Oh,” she said, “I’ll bet you got homogenized milk. I should have told you to get the regular, so we can pour off the cream.” She opened the brown paper bag and saw the beer. “Beer,” she said.

  “It’s a warm day,” he said, with nervousness.

  “You did get regular milk,” she said, lifting out the carton.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “Do you want coffee?”

  “I’d rather have beer.”

  “No beer for me. I can never drink beer.” At the drainboard she produced an opener and opened his beer bottle for him. She poured him a glassful and held it out to him. “What did you think of the R & J Mimeographing Service?” she said.

  “Seemed very nice at first glance. Modern.”

  She said, “Would you look over the office and tell me what you think we ought to do? I know you have experience we don’t have.”

  Taken by surprise he could say nothing.

  “Do you know what I wish?” she said. “I wish you’d take it over and run it. You could put in a line of portables. Then at Christmas when everybody else is making money we’d have something to sell.” With intensity she glared up at him, her eyes small. “I mean it. While you were gone I thought about it. Zoe is no good at all; I have to get rid of her. I’m going to anyhow. Each of us has three thousand dollars in it; that’s all. Just six thousand dollars in all. The settlement I reached with Walt gives me just about that. I was going to pay off this house, but what I think I’ll do - what I really want to do - is buy out Zoe and run the office myself. Then you can take it over and do what you want. Maybe I can make a deal with the bank and borrow enough so you can put in portables, or if you don’t want to do that, you can put in whatever else you want.”

  He was silent with disbelief.

  “I want to wash my hands of it,” she said.

  “I know you do,” he murmured.

  “I’m not cut out for cutthroat things like business. I want to stay home and be with Taffy. I only see her for an hour or so in the evenings. I have a woman come in about two and clean up the house and then go pick up Taffy and bring her home and be here with her until I get home at six. She took care of the house and Taffy while I was down in Mexico. Walt’s in Utah, in Salt Lake City. He’s been there for almost a year.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “Couldn’t you do that?” she demanded. “Run the office?”

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “Here’s what I thought about paying you. Zoe and I draw two salaries out. You can have exactly half the profits. Not a salary but exactly fifty percent of the net. How’s that? As much as I make, and you don’t have to worry about any investment.”

  “That’s wrong,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “It’s not fair to you.”

  In an agonized voice she said, “I have to have somebody to help me.” She moved away from him, her arms folded tightly about her. “I need somebody I can depend on. I don’t have Walt - I used to depend on him. He’s in the galvanized pipe business. All my time has to be spent with Taffy; that’s all there is to it. That has to come first. I don’t know how much you’re making now … you’re probably making more. But if you were smart, you could make it pay off. Don’t you agree? It’s small, but it’s a good location.”

  “Yes it is,” he said.

  Suddenly she spun around to face him. “Bruce,” she said, in a husky, almost tearful voice, “last night I lay awake thinking about you. I knew you’d come by. I was sitting out in the backyard hoping you’d come by. I waited all morning. I knew you had this -” She waved her hand. “This business to finish up. That’s why I stayed home from the office. I didn’t want to see you down there. Zoe and I don’t get a
long at all; I don’t want her to know anything about this until it’s all been arranged and there’s nothing left but simply to walk up to her and face her squarely and tell her I want to buy her share. It’s part of the legal agreement between us. We agreed when we became partners. I dread telling her … we’ve been friends for years. She and I lived together in Montario, when I was teaching at Garret A. Hobart.”

  He thought: Perhaps she was one of the women in that house.

  “Listen, Bruce,” she said in a grindingly serious voice. “I’m going to be totally honest with you. I’m really up against it. I didn’t get any alimony from Walt. He’s out of the state. He will send some money every month, but that’s for Taffy. And it won’t be much. I have exactly four thousand dollars that was my share of what we had, plus this house. There’s about five thousand more in the house. He kept the car. I got some furniture but it isn’t much. I really feel desperate. I’m not going to get a job; I’ve had my fill of that. I gave up teaching when I got married. I’d go to my grave before I’d teach again, or get a job as a secretary or a typist or a clerk somewhere. I won’t be degraded. I’d let Walt have Taffy and I’d -” She broke off. Rocking back and forth, her arms wrapped about her, she said, “I’m very lonely. Most of our friends are off me because they think it’s my fault Walt and I split up. You saw those people at Peg’s. They’re just a bunch of -“

  “Clerks,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “That’s what you get in a small town,” he said.

  “Maybe that’s what I should do. Go down and live in Reno. Or go to the East Coast. But I have this goddamn mimeographing and typing business. Bruce -” Her voice rose. “I have to make it pay.” She advanced toward him. “I’ll bet with you running it it would pay. I know it would. If you hadn’t come by I would have gone down to Reno on the Greyhound and looked you up. I even called them and found out when the buses go. I’ll show you.” She shot past him, out of the room. Almost at once she was back, waving a folded piece of typing paper on which, in pencil, she had jotted down the bus schedule.