Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories Part 27

"I did. I put it somewhere," said Queenie.

"Maybe you were drunk and you threw it out," he said.

She said, "I wasn't drunk. I didn't throw it out."

But she went and looked in the garbage. No.

He sat at the table watching her. If you put it somewhere it must be somewhere. She was getting frantic.

"Are you sure?" said Stan. "Are you sure you didn't just give it away?

She was sure. She was sure she hadn't given it away. She had wrapped it up to keep. She was sure, she was almost sure she had wrapped it to keep. She was sure she had not given it away.

"Oh, I don't know about that," Stan said. "I think maybe you gave it away. And I think I know who to."

Queenie was brought to a standstill. Who to?

- 259*

"I think you gave it to Andrew."

To Andrew?

Oh, yes. Poor Andrew, who was telling her he couldn't afford to go home for Christmas. She was sorry for Andrew.

"So you gave him our cake."

No, said Queenie. Why would she do that? She would not do that. She had never thought of giving Andrew the cake.

Stan said, "Lena. Don't lie."

That was the beginning of Queenie 's long, miserable struggle. All she could say was no. No, no, I did not give the cake to anybody. I did not give the cake to Andrew. I am not lying.

No. No.

"Probably you were drunk," Stan said. "You were drunk and you are not remembering very well."

Queenie said she was not drunk.

"You were the one who was drunk," she said.

He got up and came at her with his hand raised, saying not to tell him that he 'd been drunk, never to tell him that.

Queenie cried out, "I won't. I won't. I'm sorry." And he didn't hit her. But she began to cry. She kept crying while she tried to persuade him. Why would she give away the cake she had worked so hard to make? Why would he not believe her?

Why would she lie to him?

"Everybody lies," Stan said. And the more she cried and begged him to believe her, the more cool and sarcastic he became.

"Use a little logic. If it's here, get up and find it. If it isn't here, then you gave it away."

Queenie said that wasn't logic. It did not have to be given away just because she could not find it. Then he came close to her again in such a calm, half-smiling way that she thought for a moment he was going to kiss her. Instead he closed his hands around her throat and just for a second cut off her breath. He didn't even leave any marks.

- 260*

"Now," he said. "Now-are you going to teach me about logic?"

Then he went to get dressed to go and play at the restaurant.

He stopped speaking to her. He wrote her a note saying he would speak to her again when she told the truth. All over Christmas she could not stop crying. She and Stan were supposed to go and visit the Greek people on Christmas Day, but she couldn't go her face was such a mess. Stan had to go and say that she was sick. The Greek people probably knew the truth anyway. They had probably heard the hullabaloo through the walls.

She put on a ton of makeup and went to work, and the manager said, "You want to give people the idea this is a sob story?" She said she had infected sinuses and he let her go home.

When Stan came home that night and pretended she didn't exist she turned over and looked at him. She knew that he would get into bed and lie beside her like a post and that if she moved against him he would continue to lie like a post until she moved away. She saw that he could go on living like this and she could not. She thought that if she had to go on in this way she would die. Just as if he really had choked off her breath, she would die.

So she said, Forgive me.

Forgive me. I did what you said. I'm sorry.

Please. Please. I'm sorry.

He sat down on the bed. He didn't say anything.

She said that she had really forgotten about giving the cake away but that now she remembered that she had done it and she was sorry.

"I wasn't lying," she said. "I forgot."

"You forgot you gave the cake to Andrew?" he said.

"I must have. I forgot."

"To Andrew. You gave it to Andrew."

Yes, Queenie said. Yes, yes, that was what she had done. And she began to howl and hang on to him and beg him to forgive her.

- 261*

All right, stop the hysterics, he said. He did not say that he forgave her, but he got a warm washcloth and wiped her face and lay down beside her and cuddled her and pretty soon he wanted to do everything else.

"No more music lessons for Mr. Moonlight Sonata."

And then to top if all off, later she found the cake.

She found it wrapped up in a dish towel and then wrapped in waxed paper just as she had remembered. And put into a shopping bag and hung from a hook on the back porch. Of course. The sun-porch was the ideal place because it got too cold to use in winter, but it wasn't freezing cold. She must have been thinking that when she hung the cake there. That this was the ideal place. And then she forgot. She had been a little drunk- she must have been. She had forgotten absolutely. And there it was.

She found it, and she threw it all out. She never told Stan.

"I pitched it," she said. "It was just as good as ever and all that expensive fruit and stuff in it, but there was no way I wanted to get that subject brought up again. So I just pitched it out."

Her voice, which had been so woeful in the bad parts of the story, was now sly and full of laughter, as if all the time she had been telling me a joke, and throwing out the cake was the final, ridiculous point of it.

I had to pull my head out of her hands and turn around and look at her.

I said, "But he was wrong."

"Well, of course he was wrong. Men are not normal, Chrissy.

That's one thing you'll learn if you ever get married."

"I never will, then. I never will get married."

"He was just jealous," she said. "He was just so jealous."

"Never."

"Well, you and me are very different, Chrissy. Very different." She sighed. She said, "I am a creature of love."

- 262*

I thought that you might see these words on a movie poster.

"A creature of love." Maybe on a poster of one of the movies that had played at Queenie 's theater.

"You are going to look so good when I take these rollers out,"

she said. "You won't be saying you haven't got a boyfriend for very long. But it'll be too late to go looking today. Early bird tomorrow. If Stan asks you anything, say you went to a couple of places and they took your phone number. Say a store or a restaurant or anything, just so long as he thinks you're looking."

I was hired the next day at the first place I tried, though I hadn't managed to be such an early bird after all. Queenie had decided to do my hair still another way and to make up my eyes, but the result was not what she had hoped for. "You're really more the natural type after all," she said, and I scrubbed it all off and put on my own lipstick, which was ordinary red, not glimmering-pale like hers.

By this time it was too late for Queenie to go out with me to check on her Post Office box. She had to get ready to go to the movie theater. It was a Sat.u.r.day, so she had to work in the afternoon as well as in the evening. She got out her key and asked me to check the box for her, as a favor. She explained to me where it was.

"I had to get my own box when I wrote to your dad," she said.

The job I got was in a drugstore in the bas.e.m.e.nt of an apartment building. I was hired to work behind the lunch counter. When I first came in I felt fairly hopeless. My hairstyle was drooping in the heat and I had a moustache of sweat on my upper lip. At least my cramps had moderated.

A woman in a white uniform was at the counter, drinking coffee.

- 263*

"Did you come about the job?" she said.

I said yes. The woman had a hard, square face, pencilled eyebrows, a beehive of purplish hair.

"You speak English, do you? "

"Yes."

"I mean you didn't just learn it? You're not a foreigner?"

I said I wasn't.

"I tried out two girls in the last two days and I had to let them both go. One let on she could speak English, but she couldn't and the other I had to tell her everything ten times over. Wash your hands good at the sink and I'll get you an ap.r.o.n. My husband is the pharmacist and I do the till." (I noticed for the first time a gray-haired man behind a high counter in the corner looking at me and pretending not to.) "It's slow now, but it'll get busy in a while. It's all old people in this block and after their naps they start coming down here wanting coffee."

I tied on an ap.r.o.n and took my place behind the counter.

Hired for a job in Toronto. I tried to find out where things were without asking questions and had to ask only two-how to work the coffeemaker and what to do about the money.

"You make out the bill and they bring it to me. What did you think?"

It was all right. People came in one or two at a time mostly wanting coffee or a c.o.ke. I kept the cups washed and wiped, the counter clean, and apparently I made out the bills properly, since there was no complaint. The customers were mostly old people, as the woman had said. Some spoke to me in a kindly way, saying I was new here and even asking where I came from. Others seemed to be in a kind of trance. One woman wanted toast and I managed that. Then I did a ham sandwich. There was a little flurry with four people there at once. A man wanted pie and ice cream, and I found the ice cream hard as cement to scoop out.

But I did it. I got more confident. I said to them, "Here you are"

when I set down their orders, and "Here 's the damage" when I presented the bill.

- 264*

In a slow moment the woman from the till came over.

"I see you made somebody toast," she said. "Can you read?"

She pointed to a sign stuck on the mirror behind the counter.

NO BREAKFAst ITEMS SERVED AFTER II A.M.

I said that I thought it was okay to make toast, if you could make toasted sandwiches.

"Well, you thought wrong. Toasted sandwiches, yes, ten cents extra. Toast, no. Do you understand now?"

I said yes. I wasn't so crushed as I might have been at first. All the time I was working I thought what a relief it would be to go back and tell Mr. Vorguilla that yes, I had a job. Now I could go and look for a room of my own to live in. Maybe tomorrow, Sunday, if the drugstore was closed. If I even had one room, I thought, Queenie would have some place to run away to if Mr.

Vorguilla got mad at her again. And if Queenie ever decided to leave Mr. Vorguilla (I persisted in thinking of this as a possibility in spite of how Queenie had finished her story), then with the pay from both our jobs maybe we could get a little apartment.

Or at least a room with a hot plate and a toilet and shower to ourselves. It would be like when we lived at home with our parents except that our parents would not be there.

I garnished each sandwich with a bit of torn-off lettuce and a dill pickle. That was what another sign on the mirror promised.

But when I got the dill pickle out of a jar I thought it looked like too much, so I cut it in half. I had just served a man a sandwich in this way when the woman from the till came over and got herself a cup of coffee. She took her coffee back to the till and drank it standing up. When the man had finished his sandwich and paid for it and left the store she came over again.

"You gave that man half a dill pickle. Have you been doing that with every sandwich?"

I said yes.

"Don't you know how to slice a pickle? One pickle ought to last ten sandwiches."

I looked at the sign. "It doesn't say a slice. It says a pickle."

- 265*