“Haven’t you got anything smaller than that?” she asked again.
I snapped out of it. She was staring at me curiously.
“Oh, I said. I poked a hand in my pocket and found a quarter. “Here you are. And give me another one while you’re at it. I’m really thirsty.”
I still had my own ten in my hand when she turned to open the refrigerator. It took only a fraction of a second to drop it in the box and pick up the other one. When she swung back around I was putting it in my wallet. I put the quarter on the counter and she gave me a nickel from the box in change, entirely unaware of the switch. There was no reason she should notice it; that stain was so narrow along the end you’d never pay any attention to it unless it had some significance for you. I was wild to examine it, but it’d have to wait. Right now there was something more important.
I sat down on one of the stools and took another drink of the coke. She walked back to where she’d left the broom leaning against the wall near the small window at the end of the room.
I lit a cigarette and swung around on the stool. “Did you ever model clothes?” I asked.
The broom stopped. She turned. “No. Why?.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. The way you walk, perhaps. You never had any training at all?”
She shook her head. Her eyes watched me, but you couldn’t read anything in them. “What made you think I had?”
I gestured with the hand holding the cigarette. “Form. Line. Flow. Call it anything. Look. Walk over to the door and back.”
Her eyes were hard and suspicious at first, and I thought she was going to tell me to go to hell. She didn’t, however. She leaned the broom against the wall and did as I said. I watched her. She’d had some natural grace to begin with, but now it was all broken up and jagged with self-consciousness. Well, I’d make her self-conscious.
“Bring those feet together!” I snapped. “What are you doing, straddling a fence?”
She stopped and gasped.
I didn’t give her a chance to say it. “I am sorry, Mrs. Nunn,” I said hurriedly. I smiled, and held up a hand in a mock gesture of defense. “Look, I mean . . . Forgive me, won’t you? It just slipped out. It’s a hard thing to explain. . . .”
“What do you mean?”
I shook my head and smiled at her again. “I’m sorry I barked like that. I didn’t stop to think. But look at it this way: the impact of a minor flaw in anything is intensified in direct proportion to the flawlessness of the rest of it. You understand, don’t you?”
“I’m not sure,” she said.
She wasn’t sure of anything now. Any of them over the age of three can see through flattery the way you can through a pane of glass—when they want to. But they can’t cope with a change of pace. Destroy their frame of reference just once and they never get oriented again, especially if you keep crossing them up.
You could see her deciding things were getting out of hand and that it was time to blow the whistle. “Well!” she said. “I must say you’ve got a nerve.”
When retreat is indicated, attack. Toujours l’audace. It can get you many a fat lip, but plenty of times it’ll work, if you know precisely where to stop the offensive. I fastened the slow stare on her, starting at her ankles and going north across the long bare legs and the denim shorts, the sucked-in waist, the curves at the front of her shirt, and finally coming to rest on a white face and a blazing pair of eyes. It was deliberate, and infuriatingly obvious. She drew in a sharp breath.
“Oh,” I said in sudden confusion, as if it had just dawned on me. “Please, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way at all. It was just the reverse, in fact. I was imagining you in an evening gown.”
She circled this warily, looking for a place that wasn’t loaded.
“Women who can wear clothes,” I said, “look so wonderful wearing them.” I stared at her thoughtfully and then went on,
“Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks how sweetly flows
The liquefaction of her clothes”
“What’s that?” she asked wonderingly.
“Robert Herrick,” I said. I picked up the other bottle of coke and walked casually over and put it in her hand. She looked up at me a little cautiously, still trying to figure it out. I left her standing there as I strolled over to the screen door and stood gazing idly out at the sun-blasted clearing.
“This is a beautiful place here,” I said.
There was no answer for a moment. Whoever it was in that car, I thought, the one I’d heard as I came up to the slip. But maybe there’d been somebody here before that.
“Why . . .?” she asked behind me. “I mean, what was that you meant about my feet?”
“I wish you’d forget that,” I said. “It was nothing, really, and I’m sorry.”
“But why did you say it? Most women walk with their feet about that far apart. Don’t they?”
“That’s right,” I said. “And on most women it doesn’t mean a thing.”
“Why?”
“Because they walk like pack animals to begin with.”
“Oh . . .”
I turned then and grinned at her. “I know you must think I’m crazy. I’m sorry. I didn’t have any right to make personal remarks like that. But it’s just—well, you’re touchy about the things you’re sensitive to, that’s all. I happen to think tall women are very beautiful to look at when they move right, and too few of them do. So meeting one who does is apt to be a little startling. You can put your foot in your mouth before you think, if you’re not careful.”
“Oh.” She thought about it for a moment, and then she said, “Well, it really wasn’t anything to get mad about, anyway. Was it?”
She made no move to return to the sweeping. The sullenness had disappeared; there was something almost pathetically wistful in the way her face was opening up and in the tentative friendliness of her voice.
You’re a dirty son of a bitch, I thought.
Her name was Jewel Tennison before she was married, and she was twenty-four. She had lived all her life in Exeter, the county seat, except for one whole year with an aunt in New Orleans when she was about twelve. Her mother and father were both dead. She had a brother who lived in California, in Barstow. No, the name wasn’t spelled like Lord Tennyson’s. She remembered about him. She’d had him in high school. That was with a “y,” wasn’t it? They’d had a house in Exeter, nearly half paid for, when he lost his job in the sheriff’s department, and they’d sold it and bought this camp. She had also put in twelve hundred dollars her mother had left her. She had been a drum majorette in high school and she missed television out here. They could probably put up high enough an antenna to get the two Sanport channels, but there wasn’t any electricity. She liked I Love Lucy.
No, she’d never thought about her hands that way. It was awful the way dishwater made them so rough, but she hadn’t paid much attention to the way they were made underneath. Did I really think they were expressive? Where had I learned to notice things like that about women, little things like their hands and the way they walked? Not that way about the way they walked—she knew I didn’t mean it like that. It was different, kind of, wasn’t it? Most men just—well, you know.
No, she didn’t like fishing. The fish themselves gave you the creeps. They felt cold, and scaly. You know. And they’d fin you if you didn’t watch out. She swam a little, but there were water moccasins in the lake. She’d played tennis some, in high school, but she didn’t think women should take athletics too seriously. They got muscles. Nobody liked women with muscles. Especially in their legs.