on. I’m your kind of person and I need to know you. Because I’ve been away from home for a long time.”
You can’t do these things.
She might be wrong, tricked by an accidental resemblance. She stood silent while the girl left, the little bell over the door fading away into silence. Walking lightly in dirty sneakers, moving like a dancer, she was gone.
The boy said, “Don’t let Erika bother you. She’s a wonderful person and she’s had a rough time. Her best friend was killed in an accident last winter and she was in the hospital for a long time.”
“I like her.”
The statement fell on its face. He let it lie there. “Why don’t you just browse around, if you feel like it, and I’ll be in the back room if you find something you like. My name is Vince,” he added with a charming smile.
She was too confused to look at books. She bought the carved cat, paid for it and left clutching it, with change in her sweaty hand.
The heat didn’t bother her now, or the toe-pinching shoes, or the fact that she had missed both breakfast and lunch. She walked unseeing through the noon streets without considering where she was going. At the corner she almost bumped into a woman who swerved aside to miss her, then called her by name. Half a block later she realized that it was one of the Wives—which one, she had no idea. It didn’t matter.
Thank God, there was someone. Someone whose last name she didn’t know, who had barely spoken to her and then only to rebuff her. Erika, a teacher—and she had lost someone in a tragic accident. “Best friend” was the way Vince had put it, of course. That meant she was alone and probably lonely.
I have to see her again, Frances thought, worried. But how? And how to undo this horrible first impression?
Through the bookstore boy, of course. Anyone can buy books.
It was after twelve. The sun stood high in the sky behind a stone church with square towers, flying buttresses, and the most lurid stained glass windows she had ever seen, dominating a downtown corner as though the town had grown up around it. As it probably had.
She felt tired. She signalled a cruising cab.
Halfway home, she remembered that she had left her nylons and letter paper in the bookstore. That meant she would have to go back and pick them up. Blessed Freudian slip, giving her a good excuse for what she most wanted to do.
It was Friday, the end of the week. There was the weekend to get through, and a triumphant Bill who was already in the swing of things at the plant, very much on top, already confident with success. Already the top-echelon men at the factory were replacing his city friends in his dinner-table monologues and, so far as she could tell, in his affections. He had found a good barber, a satisfactory place to lunch and a quiet bar for a five o’clock drink. At home he was happy and undemanding, asking only that she appreciate him. True, Sunday was coming up and he would probably start fumbling at her before she got the dinner dishes stacked, but she could stand it.
She shut her eyes and leaned her head back against the slippery upholstery, thinking about a slender sad-faced girl with fair hair and a light way of walking.
I’ll find her, she thought, smiling a little, and next time I’ll be myself. I’ll find some way to let her know.
4 SHE LAY AWAKE FOR A LONG TIME AFTER BILL rolled over to his own side of the bed, turned his face to the wall and began to snore. The male smell was on her, the events of the last half hour were clear in her mind, yet it all seemed unreal, like something seen in the movies. She thought, I really am a whore. And she didn’t care.
At last she got up, too restless to lie still anymore and afraid that her turning would wake Bill. She showered, put on her old terry robe, and went downstairs, feeling her way along stair railings and groping for doorknobs in the still-unfamiliar house. Under the bright overhead light of the kitchen she made coffee and sat writing shopping lists while it perked. Things she needed for the house: a sofa, rugs, curtains, a telephone stand. Things she needed for herself: a light jacket, gloves, shampoo. In the morning she would read it all over and decide how much of it made sense; she always felt wide-awake and alert at this hour, but in the light of day her ideas sometimes looked quite different.
She knew, in the back of her mind, why she was doing all this. With a handful of lists she had a valid reason for going downtown in the morning, and while she was there she would visit the bookstore. That was what she had been waiting for all through Friday night, Saturday and Sunday—might as well admit it. She set down her empty cup and looked blindly out of the window.
She was setting out to look for a girl she had seen only once, a girl who had no reason to be interested in her; who might even, if they met again, actively dislike her. No reason she shouldn’t.
She put all the lists in her purse and picked her way back to bed. The radium dial of her clock said one twenty. She lay thinking about Erika’s greenish-gray eyes. Did they slant a little or didn’t they? Something gave her a slightly exotic look, piquant with that fair hair. She fell asleep trying to make up her mind.
Bill looked a little guilty at breakfast and a little resentful too, like a man who has been accused of something he didn’t do but would have liked to. He said, “It’s going to be a hot day,” and she said, scorning the weather, “I’m going downtown to look at some furniture. All right?”
“Better fix yourself some breakfast then.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You don’t need to diet. You women are all crazy when it comes to weight.”
“That’s right.”
He looked at her, unsatisfied but finding nothing to argue with.
She put on an old cotton skirt, plain shirt and loafers, office clothes left over from the days when she was Bake’s girl—not to be confused with Mrs. William Ollenfield. Pushing the hangers along her closet bar and looking with distaste at her wardrobe, she wondered what had ever possessed her to buy so many clothes she didn’t like. Mrs. William Ollenfield seemed to be the sort of woman who goes shopping in a hat and gloves, who wears little printed silks and puts scatter pins on the lapel of a suit. Sooner or later, she would want and get a fur coat. Frances faced herself in the long mirror.
She was no longer certain who she was or what she might hope to become, but she certainly didn’t intend to spend the rest of her life pretending to be Mrs. William Ollenfield, that smug little housewife. She didn’t even like the way the woman did her hair. She ran a wet comb through the lacquered curls, smacked down the resulting fuzz with a brush dipped in Bill’s hair stuff, and caught the subdued ends in a barrette. The plain styling brought out the oval shape of her face and the winged eyebrows, her only beauty. (Not quite the only one, Bake had argued, touching her lightly to remind her.) Now she was beginning to look like herself again.
She ran downstairs, relishing the freedom of bare legs and old shapeless loafers.
It was one of those lazy summer days that seem endless, with sunlight clear and golden over the world and great patches of shade under arching branches. Grass and trees still wore the bright green of early summer. People moved along with open, friendly faces, looking washed and ironed. She climbed aboard a fat yellow bus and handed the driver a dollar, not wanting to admit that she didn’t know what the fare was. He gave back eighty-five cents.
