“No,” she said. “We’re not making a living—Bruce? Is that your first name? The thing that depresses me is that now is when I really can use a source of income. And that’s what it isn’t.”
He asked, “Who owns the toys I saw out back?”
“Taffy,” she said. “My daughter. She’s in school. Second grade.”
He had an impulse, at that moment, to tell her that she had been his teacher. The message almost came out of him; he stammered a few words and then said instead, “If you were a teacher, why don’t you educate her at home? That seems ideal to me.”
“The group,” Susan said. “A child needs training to prepare him to live with a group. Would you like some coffee?” Arising from her chair she started out of the room.
“No, thanks,” he mumbled. The impulse passed, and, strangely, no intention to tell her remained, no desire at all. Probably he would never get around to telling her; the subject had closed itself for good, leaving nothing behind. Except that he knew. He remembered her, the young woman teacher of those days, who had been there, one morning when they arrived.
In those days, he thought, she probably was twenty-three or -four. Good God, he thought. The age I am now.
Thinking that, he tried to picture her as she had actually been in those days, not as she had looked to him a fifth grade student eleven years old. The image was unclear as it could possibly be. He could shut his eyes and imagine various cronies of the times: Nigger Lips Tate, Bud McVae, Earl Smith, Louis Selkirk, the kid in the apartment house across the street who had pantsed him one afternoon in plain sight of everyone, the girl who sat across from him in class and who had the long black hair and whom Gene Scanlan had written the note to, for him, which old Mrs. Jaffey, their former teacher, had happened on and—thank God—been unable to read. All that was still visible to him, but when he thought about her, about Miss Reuben, he saw only a tight-faced woman, with angry eyes and pale, twitching lips, who stood very tall with her arms folded, at the front of the room, wearing a blue suit with huge buttons like campaign badges, only white. And the carrying-power of her voice, especially on the playground during recess; she had stood up on the ramp by the door to the building supervising them, wearing a heavy coat over her shoulders. She had come out to Idaho from Florida, and she was not accustomed to the cold. In the winter and first months of spring she had shivered and complained, even to them, and her face had been drawn and pinched, her lips tucked in almost out of sight. In class she talked constantly about Florida and how wonderful the climate there was, the oranges and lemons, the beaches. They had all listened. They were obliged to.
From the first day, he had been frightened of her. All of them had seen that she was a mean, intense young woman, simmering with strength, quite different from old Mrs. Jaffey, who had been ill and who had gone downstairs to the nurse one day, in the middle of the afternoon, and who had not come back. For months Mrs. Jaffey had complained of weariness and fever. After she had left the room, the children began screaming and hurling erasers. They had a fine time until the Principal appeared and hushed them up. And then, a few days later, they had arrived at their classroom to find Miss Reuben.
Mrs. Jaffey had been the oldest teacher at the Garret A. Hobart Grammar School, and none of the other teachers had gotten on with her very well. She had intended to retire at the end of the semester anyhow. She was sixty-eight years old. According to Mr. Hillings the Principal she had taught at the school when it first opened up, forty-one years ago, in 1904.
He, Skip Stevens, had gotten along swell with Mrs. Jaffey. In fact, she had supervised his election to Class President, which entitled him to hold forth at assemblies in the name of Fifth Grade, plus honorary powers such as deciding when to water the Fifth Grade Vegetable Garden in back of the school. At that time he had been a beefy, large boy, with red hair and freckles, good at kickball during recess, the first out of the caféteria at lunch time and onto the playing field.
Now, looking back, he realized that he had been a bully. Since he had outweighed the other boys, it had been a natural role; he did not feel guilt. Somebody had to be the bully, at that age.
As far as Mrs. Jaffey went, during her last months she had become too infirm and inobservant to bother anyone. By the time she had given up and gone downstairs to the nurse, he had had the run of the room. One day he had started a fire in the clockroom. And once, when Mrs. Jaffey had left to go to the teachers’ washroom, he had dumped the wastebasket onto her desk.
Susan, re-emerging from the kitchen, holding an aluminum coffee pot, said, “Bruce, do you have your car? There’s no milk. I wonder if I could talk you into going down and getting a carton of milk. Here.” She sat down the coffee pot and went over to pick up her purse from the living room sofa. Handing him a fifty-cent piece she said, “There’s a grocery store down about four blocks, on the corner. What happened about you car wax? Did you get that cleared up?”
“Yes,” he said. “I closed the deal.” He did not accept the fifty-cent piece. But he started toward the front door.
“And when do you have to go back to Reno?”
“This evening,” he said.
“Oh good,” she said. “Then you don’t have to leave right away.”
“I’ll be right back,” he said, opening the door and going out onto the porch.
As he drove off, away from the house, he wondered to himself why he did not mind doing this. Errands, he thought. But it meant he could do something for her.
That pleased him.
Should it? he asked himself. Should I want to do something for her? A woman I feared … a young lady teacher who bawled me out, humiliated me in front of the class. Perhaps, he thought, I am re-entering the pattern. Obedience. Slavery. The inequality of childhood …
But he did not feel chained, compulsively following orders from her. He got a kick out of it; driving along in his Merc, searching for the grocery store, he felt important. Useful. To be depended on.
When he arrived back at the house, with the carton of milk, he found her in the living room. She had a fountain pen out, and was signing checks, grim-faced, with her lips drawn tightly together. That expression was stong in his memory: the tight, fierce resentment on her face. The lines crossing her forehead. She had put a shawl-like sweater over her shoulders, unbuttoned—a loose grandmotherish pink sweater, for warmth. The living room seemed cool to him, too. Dark and quiet and out of the sun. During his absence she had shut off the radio; the dance music no longer played. Without it, the house seemed older, more serious and sturdy. In her sweater she, too, seemed older. She had put shoes on, not the ones he had noticed in the yard, but a pair of saddle shoes. And white cotton bobby socks.
“Does your discount house sell typewriters?” she asked, without looking up. “Or did I ask you that.”
He carried the carton of milk into the kitchen. In addition to it he had bought a couple of bottles of Lucky Lager beer and a bag of cheese-flavored crackers. “We carry a few lines of portables,” he said. “No office models or electrics.”
Pushing a piece of folded-up shiny paper toward him she said, “See what you think of this.”
He read it over. It was an ad for a portable that used the new carbon ribbon.
“The salesmen come in,” Susan said. “They start giving us all the verbiage … honestly, the way they push the retailer around. Loading them up.”
“You have to fight back,” he said.
“We sell a few used machines. We just don’t have enough money to stock portables. If they’d give them to us on consignment … does it tell how much they want for this one?”
He saw no price on the ad, either wholesale or retail. “No,” he said.