got up and pulled her clothes on, ignoring him. “What’s the hurry?”
“I’m cold.”
“Well, I ought to get up and go over to the plant for a while anyhow.”
She felt sticky and smeary and she wanted a bath. Instead, she went downstairs, trying to take her mind off what had just happened. Standing beside the dining room window, she looked out on a view almost identical with the one she had left behind on Chicago’s South Side: a brick house next door, a wider expanse of lawn and healthier-looking flowers here, a tricycle forgotten in the rain.
She wondered where Kay was at this moment and what she was doing. And Bake. But that hurt, the thought of Bake and Jane having a rainy Saturday at home. She tried to think about Karla’s instead. If I were there I’d pick somebody up. Anybody. Anybody would be better than this.
But Karla’s was a million miles away and a million years ago. She had made her choice. The door was shut.
In a few minutes Bill came down, wearing his old jacket and slacks but with his hair neatly combed. “If you don’t care I think I’ll run over to the shop a few minutes—see how they’re making out. We’re running a skeleton crew on Saturdays till we go into full production. You don’t mind staying alone for a while, do you?”
“Of course not.”
He couldn’t look at her. Never could after one of these daytime performances. He said, “I’ll bring back a pizza or something.”
“That’ll be nice.”
The good provider. He would probably let her have a Victorian sofa bristling with red velvet and brass tacks, if she showed any sign of wanting one. Or a mink stole. Anything, except the right to be herself.
When the sound of the car died away she locked the doors and searched methodically through all the cupboards, hoping insanely that someone had left a bottle. They hadn’t, of course. She wandered into the living room and sat down on the sofa (not Victorian, but late Sears Roebuck) and looked out at the dripping rain.
I’m not a good wife, she thought dismally. I’m not even a very good whore. I don’t know what I am.
3 FURNISHING AN EIGHT-ROOM HOUSE IS WORK, BUT it comes to an end eventually. Two weeks after that rainy moving day, Frances backed down off a stepladder and stood looking up at her new curtains. There wasn’t another thing she could do to the place. Not one.
Now what?
Bill was apparently there to stay. He had given her a guided tour of the place, pointing out the solid foundations, hardwood floors and full-size basement and attic. The bathroom and downstairs lavatory were not only tiled with real tile but equipped with copper piping guaranteed to last a lifetime. The roof was fireproof, the siding waterproof. What more could anybody want?
A home-owner’s pride colored his voice when he suggested, “You could make a swell TV room down here. Put in one of those portable bars.”
“Why don’t you mention it to Mr. Bowers?”
His look accused her of treason. “Hell, he’ll never get back to work. He ought to retire and move to Florida or someplace where it’s warm. Be glad if I took the place off his hands.”
She was trapped, then. These were the prison walls closing in around her, decked out in new large-figure wallpaper.
Standing at the foot of the ladder, she wondered bleakly how Kay’s confident prophecy was going to come true. She might take a male lover—what was a little adultery in the executive echelons? But if she made a pass at a girl—wow!
She supposed it happened now and then, in a country where one-tenth of all women were supposed to be gay. But she knew, miserably, that Bill would be suspicious of any friendship she made. His ostentatious forgiveness didn’t stretch that far. And it made her miserable to tell lies.
She couldn’t discuss it with him. He went all tight lipped and gimlet eyed whenever they passed a butch type on the street. It was no use to argue that “the girls” were like everybody else, except in their sex life—and that wasn’t as different as he thought! She couldn’t say, “Look, we’re people too.” He wouldn’t let her bring the subject up.
And yet, according to the law of averages, two or three of the chicks in his office had to belong. Secretary, file clerk, ad writer, switchboard operator.
Thinking about it made her restless. She showered, pulled on a printed blue silk dress with a little ruffle at the neck—a Mrs. William Ollenfield dress, chosen to conform to Bill’s idea of a womanly woman—and doused herself with Je Reviens. She’d go downtown and look at clothes. Have a facial, manicure, hair-tint job, wave and set—hell, why not have her nose pierced too, while she was at it? She might even eat lunch in a tearoom, something squishy in a patty shell, and a fattening dessert. It was what the Wives would do.
Maybe if you did the housewife bit for ten or fifteen years you got used to it. Maybe a fifteen-minute bedding twice a week, without active participation, came to stand for sex. A pretty prospect.
THE CABBIE SAID, “Where you want to go, lady?”
She gave him her best smile. “I don’t know, I’m new in town. Where’s the best place to get my hair done?”
He looked her over carefully, twisting around in the seat. Apparently she qualified. “There’s Shapiro’s. That’s about the best store in town, and they got a regular beauty parlor. They got everything Marshall Field’s has, except the escalator.”
“All right, let’s try Shapiro’s.”
She gave him fifty cents more than the meter said, and he thanked her politely but without enthusiasm and drove away, leaving her standing in a completely strange place, trying to organize her thoughts.
This was Main Street. The sign at the corner said so, and besides it looked like Main Street. Parking meters, stores, banks, traffic lights. Shapiro’s was four stories high. The Waubonsie State Savings and Loan towered five floors above it, on the corner. She already felt at home with the Savings and Loan; a book of its pale-green checks lay alongside the lipstick in her handbag.
Shapiro’s was air-conditioned. She went in, past the display windows with a few summer evening frocks and accessories, past the lady clerks who were surely older than their hair styles and younger than their feet, past the impulse tables of jewelry and gloves, suntan lotion, and dark glasses. In this familiar setting her timidity melted away. She was wafted to the top floor in a slow elevator piloted by a young tan girl in white gloves, and found the beauty salon by the acrid smell of wave lotion. The reception desk was standard and so was the reception: they were booked solid, but they would try to fit her in.
She chose one of a long row of identical metal mesh chairs and looked around at the other waiting women. They all looked married. Business girls, of course, would come in on their lunch hour. Halfway through her second cigarette the receptionist said, “Miss Bernadette will take you now,” and there was Miss Bernadette, plump and pleasant in her yellow nylon uniform. With a wedding ring.
But it seemed to her that surely, if she looked searchingly and didn’t miss anybody, she would find someone. Her hair rinsed and dried and baked into little tight curls, she sat through the boredom of a manicure.
