She interrupted the recital that he knew was about to come by turning her head sharply. “Milly, turn off that thing! You’ve had enough now! It’s giving me a headache.”
Then back to him again. “I had my usual glamorous day. What else? You didn’t expect it to be any different, did you? I know I don’t — not any more.”
He turned away from her, sought out his usual chair, and sank into it, weary, the paper he had just bought unopened on his lap. This had to be got through, he knew. More and more frequently lately, this had to be got through.
“It’s housework, housework, all day long!” she went on gratingly. She was coming and going, putting plates on the table now. “Doing the dishes, making the beds, cleaning, cleaning! And when it comes to washing clothes, I never get through. I no sooner turn around, and they’ve gotten themselves all dirty again.”
“Kid are kids,” he said leniently. “You were that way when you were a kid. I was too. You can’t keep them locked up in a glass case. It isn’t right.”
“That’s easy for you to say, you don’t have to wash their things.” The meat balls had finally appeared. They all gathered around the table, which was in the one main room. She resumed: “Then when I do get to go out, in the afternoons, where do I go? The A. and P. or Safeway, Safeway or the A. and P. That’s my outing. That’s my recreation. I have to push a cart through the street both ways, coming and going. I’m so sick of standing on check-out lines and having arguments with people in back of me, people in front of me. I’m so sick of looking cans of corned beef in the face. Today they short-changed me a dollar, a whole dollar.”
“Don’t they give out those little paper tapes with the items listed on them?”
“It wasn’t on there. It was in the change he handed back to me I had a terrible time about it. They had to empty out the whole cash register. Then coming back, a taxi made a right turn into Amsterdam Avenue and tipped over my shopping cart, and I had to pick up everything all over the street.”
“Were you crossing against the light?” he said uneasily. “Don’t ever—”
“No, but they changed too quick for me.”
“My day wasn’t good either,” he said. But he said it uncomplainingly, as if to show her what to do with a day that wasn’t so good.
“Yes, but with a man it’s different,” she caught him up immediately. “You get out of the house at least, the first thing in the morning, and don’t come back to it again until the evening. You don’t have the kids in your hair the whole livelong day—”
She had stopped eating now, overcome by her frustration.
“Eat,” he urged gently. “Don’t let it get you.”
“I can’t help it. I should never have—”
He seemed to know what she’d been about to say. “Should never have married me?” He finished it for her ruefully.
“No, not you. I should never have married at all. I should have been like my sister. I should have listened to her—”
Here comes her sister again, he thought, but forbearingly.
“She has a maid, she has a gorgeous apartment, she dresses like a queen—”
“I know, I know,” he said patiently. “You told me many times.”
She put the kids in the bedroom. When she came back he laid down the paper and looked at her, with a sort of understanding pity, a sort of pitying understanding. “Let the dishes go,” he said. “For once. Come on, I’ll take you to the movies. Get your hat. It’ll take your mind off things.”
“The kids?” Her smile was bleak. “You forget.”
“They’re old enough now, they’ll be all right. It’s only for a couple of hours. Mrs. Silvano next door can look in on them now and then.”
“The movies,” she said. Suddenly she laughed. It wasn’t a good sound. “Oh, you’re too good to me. You’re spoiling me!”
“Don’t,” he said.
The days and weeks of pent-up discontent, the years of it, seemed to brim over all at once. She sat down heavily at the cleared table, began to pound it at spaced intervals with her clenched fist, to underscore the torrent of words that suddenly poured from her.
“She gets night clubs, I get the movies. She gets lobster Newburg, I get meat balls. She gets champagne, I get Seven Up. She has charge accounts in all the swellest stores in town, I go to Woolworth’s. She was up here a couple weeks ago — you should have seen how she was dressed. A mink. A diamond on her finger as big as — pearls around her neck.”
“You told me, you told me,” he mumbled wearily. “How often."
“She felt sorry for me. I could tell it, she didn’t have to say so. When she left, I found a hundred dollars hiding under the coffee pot. She didn’t want to hurt my pride.” And then in tragic summation: “Oh, why did I throw away my life this way!”
“Here,” he said. “Here.” He handed the paper to her.
“What’s this for, something to keep me quiet?” She stared at him as if she couldn’t make up her mind for a moment whether he was making fun of her or was serious. “Now it’s the paper I get for my evening’s recreation. A big five-cent tabloid to keep me amused.”
“Open it,” he said quietly. “Read the second page.”
Her face was suddenly one big scar of shock, and just as white as such a scar is. A great gust of breath was drawn from her.
“Beatrice Barrett,” she gasped, almost voiceless. “That’s Bessie, that’s the name she used in her career.”
For a long time there was silence in the room. He just sat there holding his head, like the failures in life who’ve tried to do their best but are failures just the same. Then after a while she moved over toward him, softly, quietly. Almost like a kiss.
She sank to her knees beside him.
“What’re you doing?” he asked her. But not abruptly, in that same quiet way he always had with her.
“Thanking God.” And he saw that her eyes were moist.
When she’d finished weeping, she raised her head and smiled at him.
“Does that offer to go to the movies still hold?”
He smiled back, nodding his head.
“Just one more thing,” she said, like a little girl coaxing.
“Anything.”
“No, not anything. Just one more thing. Just a bag of popcorn. That’ll make my evening.”
And as they went out together, arm in arm, like the sweethearts they’d been ten years before, they passed the fallen newspaper.
She looked up at him, not down at it.
“I’ll settle for this,” she said. “The two kids, and a guy like you; and if I have to spend all the rest of my life cleaning and shopping for groceries and fixing meals and washing clothes, I won’t complain — not any more.”
The delivery truck drove up and parked at exactly 9:29 P.M.
The driver said, “Any returns?”
Mom said, “Twanny-four.”
The headline said BLONDE BEAUTY SLAIN.
Mom sat back, propped her elbows up, and waited.
A woman came along walking quickly. She had red hair, and mistrustful hazel eyes that darted wary little glances to the left and right. Many people look both ways in crossing through traffic, but she was already on the sidewalk, had finished crossing. She stepped up to the stand, snapped open her handbag, and fumbled in it for change. But while she fumbled she still found time to look to the right, look to the left. She came up with a quarter, put it down, and took the uppermost paper from the pile.
Long before she had finished folding it and wedging it under her arm, Mom had two dimes waiting for her on the next one under.
The woman scooped them up, and one dime escaped her, fell to the sidewalk with a little tink.