John D. MacDonald
Pickup
Cath looked out the wide front window, saw the street distorted by the large wet flakes that melted against the glass — and something in the wet asphalt’s shining, something about the yellow of the early street lights, the soggy fall of snow, called up the feeling of emptiness, of strangeness that had haunted her for over a month.
The street seemed to brood, the small houses cheerless under the brittle blackness of the elms, and she weighed and tested her own emotion, thinking back to her lab classes in college. Quantitative and qualitative analysis. What is this feeling of darkness that I get? How important is it? What should I do about it?
It was only in the winter, after the leaves were gone that she could see one corner of the tan stone school.
She glanced at her watch. Almost four. In a few minutes small Catherine, walking with little-girl directness, walking with the graceful promise of what she would one day become, would turn the corner, mittened hand holding onto Jerry’s snow suit, yanking him back whenever he tried to straggle off the sidewalk.
Something about the sight of them as they turned the corner always pinched her heart. It was still an unreality that they could be her children — hers and Carl’s — born of a sweetness that in itself would have been enough — almost enough. The clean freshness of a child’s soft skin, the strange pathos of grubby knuckles, of questions confidently asked.
At five Carl would come. Thinking of him brought back the new dark feeling of aloneness, and she knew that it was tied up with him somehow, but there was no way for her to find out. The new feeling was something restless within her that receded as she tried to grasp it, to find its component parts, its chemical analysis.
She walked back through the silent house to the kitchen, wondering if the long hours she spent alone had anything to do with the odd change in her. There had been no time to think, to feel, when the children had been underfoot all day.
With them gone, Catherine in first grade, Jerry in kindergarten, the house looked different. She saw frayed edges where before she had seen newness and adequacy. She felt the smallness of the house; the constriction and tension building within her was like a spring, which, if released, would flatten the walls, send the roof sailing off, open the square rooms to the gray sky above.
The children arrived while she was in the kitchen; the door banged open and Catherine’s abused, “Motherrr! Jerry’s out in the yard in a puddle, and he won’t come in,” was heard.
The feeling was gone then, because there had to be crackers and a glass of milk for the children, clean dry clothes for Jerry; there were chops to be broiled, the table to set. Jerry locked himself in the bathroom and had to be begged to unlock the door, “before Daddy comes home.”
Carl came in from the garage, and Cath saw the weariness in his face break when he saw her. As he kissed her, he ran his cold hand up the nape of her neck and laughed at her when she shivered.
Small Catherine hung onto his leg until he bought her off with the funny papers, and soon it was time for dinner.
While Cath washed the dinner dishes, Carl helped Jerry build a block bridge along the living-room rug, and young Catherine criticized the whole operation, claiming that all men really have little knowledge about bridges or anything else.
By the time Cath was through, Carl had taken Jerry upstairs, protesting as usual about the unfairness of his sister being permitted to stay up longer, by virtue of her year and a half advantage.
At last Catherine too was tucked in, the light clicked off, and Cath walked slowly down the stairs, returning Carl’s smile as he glanced up from the paper.
There were clothes to be mended, but she was content for a time merely to sit and look at Carl’s strong square hands holding the paper. Suddenly the dark feeling of despair, of aloneness, came again, welling up through her.
Carl threw the paper aside and stood up. “Honey, this tired old man of yours has to drag himself back to the treadmill. We’ve got to submit our bid on the Canal Street job tomorrow, and Jordan wants me to check over the cost figures.”
“Oh, Carl! That’s too bad. Couldn’t you have brought the work home?”
“I’d have had to hire a truck to bring the files I need. I’ll be back by twelve.”
She walked with him to the kitchen and, as he shrugged into his topcoat, she automatically noticed that the cuffs were frayed. His shoulders were slumped with weariness, and she wanted to hold him tightly, somehow to rest and restore him.
He turned at the door and looked at her, small wrinkles of concern between his eyebrows. “Are you okay, Cath?”
“Why, of course!”
“You’ve acted... well, sort of unworldly lately.” He grinned. “You’ve been drifting around like Lady Macbeth.”
She felt that her smile was more of a grimace. “I’m dandy, Butch.”
“I guess the old differential creeps up on me, honey. That twelve years I’ve got on you. Anxious old buzzard worrying about his young and lovely wife.”
She scowled with mock ferocity. “The differential is just exactly right, you oaf. A woman of twenty-seven is the same mental age as a man of thirty-nine.”
He grinned. “I did sort of take you out of circulation in the full flush of youth.” She clenched a fist and lifted it. He scuttled for the door. “Okay, I’ll be good! I’ll be good! Don’t whup me!”
After he was gone she walked back into the living room, wondering if Carl had somehow put his finger on what was troubling her, on the cause of her restlessness. There had been dancing and music and brightness, and in the middle of it all Carl had come along, with his steady eyes and gentle hands, and before long the world had become a place full of grocery bills and washing and cleaning and formulas and bitter fights with the man from the diaper service. Maybe that was it. Maybe the sense of loneliness came from the thought of time going by, each second a knife that neatly sliced off a small chunk of the only life given her.
The doorbell rang and when she answered it, Hilda Gardner, leggy and flustered, came in, pulling off her hat. “Gee, I’m sorry I’m late, Mrs. Hazard. Our clock was slow, and I didn’t know it.”
It was on the tip of Cath’s tongue to say, “But, Hilda! It was tomorrow night that we arranged!” But a small feeling of adventure, of excitement began to glow in her and, instead, she said calmly, “That’s quite all right, Hilda. Mr. Hazard has gone on ahead. The children are in bed, and I haven’t even had a chance to change yet. By the way, Hilda, can you come tomorrow night too — at eight?”
“Why, I guess so.”
Cath left Hilda on the couch doing homework and went up to her bedroom. She put on a dull green gabardine suit that brought out her pale blondness. She decided against a hat, took her old polo coat from the front hall closet, said good-by to Hilda and went out.
The feathery snow was still falling, and the touch of it on her face was gentle. There was something inside her that was akin to the night, and she tried to force out of her mind the small feeling of guilt. Carl wouldn’t have to know. She’d be back long before midnight. Just a long walk on the quiet wet streets, an escape from the small house, a chance to be alone, to sort out the reasons for the thin sorrow and regret that she carried inside her — regret that seemed like a flat, plaintive chord, endlessly repeated.
Her heels clicked firmly on the wet sidewalk, and she swung along with her shoulders back, conscious of the youngness of her body, the smooth articulation of joint and tendon. It was, oddly, as though she had walked out of prison gates, from behind high stone walls, and soon a siren would jab the night and searchlights would cut through the overcast.
She walked five blocks down Henderson Street, turned right on the boulevard, past the silent automobile showrooms, the dead white glare of gas stations, down toward the heart of the city. As she neared an all-night newsstand, a man pushed out of the shadows and fell in step with her.