“Not at all,” Lily said, virtuously knotting a thread in a dress she was making by hand for Julie’s first day at school. The dress was an economy measure: Everett had said that their 1949 taxes would be double this year’s — both the riverfront and the Cosumnes ranches had been reassessed for the first time since the war — and Lily had resolved, without mentioning it to Everett, to save money. She had begun by saving the six or seven dollars she would normally have paid for Julie’s dress, instead buying four dollars’ worth of imported lawn and a sixty-cent pattern. After three weeks of intermittent work, the lawn was not only grimy from her fingers but spotted here and there with blood from her pricked fingers; it should, however, wash up very nicely. Good fabrics, good soap, and good hats, her mother often told her, were no extravagance.
Impressed with the fruit of her own economy, Lily added: “Wanting things and working to get them. It’s the basis of the American way.”
“Balls. You aren’t even listening to me.”
“Really, Martha.” Although Lily had never known exactly what the word meant, it did not sound conversational to her. She had for that matter first heard it from Martha, the afternoon Mr. McClellan died in Sutter Hospital. Because Martha was having a cigarette with one of the doctors, Lily had been alone in the room, holding Mr. McClellan’s hand, when he woke from the coma. “You’re a good girl, Miss Lily Knight,” he said, opening his eyes and squeezing her hand weakly. “You’re sickly-looking but you’re a good girl.” “Balls,” Martha said from the doorway, seeing that her father’s eyes were again closed and his hand fallen free of Lily’s. Involuntarily, Lily had put her hand out to shield Mr. McClellan from Martha’s voice, but ten minutes later he was dead and possibly he had heard neither Martha’s invective nor, a minute later, her sobbing.
“I’m sorry,” Martha said now. “It’s only that you were at it again.”
“At what again?”
“You know.” Martha paused. “Your dress is coming along nicely. That blue should be very good on Julie.”
Lily smiled, and held the dress up for Martha’s further approval.
“If only there weren’t that gap between her teeth.”
Lily laid the dress aside and began threading a needle. Martha had told Julie that unless her teeth were straightened immediately she would grow up to be a very unattractive little girl. For several days Julie had been inconsolable, repeatedly climbing up on the washbasin to inspect her teeth in the bathroom mirror.
“I told you before, her second teeth aren’t even in.” Lily finished threading the needle and inadvertently jammed it into her index finger.
Martha shrugged, her interest in orthodontia apparently ebbing.
“Ryder just wants things,” she repeated reflectively. “That’s exactly the thing about Ryder.”
“What does Ryder want now.”
Martha looked at her a long while. “This is what they call a mo-bile situation, see, Lily. Ryder is what they call up-ward mo-bile. Or on-the-make. Didn’t you ever take any courses? Didn’t you ever read any books by Lloyd Warner?”
“There’s—” Lily stopped. She had been about to say that there was nothing wrong in wanting to get ahead. She did not know what it was about Martha that inflexibly brought out in her diction the best of both Mr. McClellan and her mother.
“There’s what?” Martha demanded.
“Nothing.”
“ ‘There’s nothing wrong in wanting to get ahead,’ ” Martha mimicked. “I know you. Well there’s not. But you don’t understand about Ryder. He wants to use people.”
“Martha. Don’t get all upset.”
“Well he can’t use me.” Martha paused. “I don’t want anything from him. That’s the reason he can’t use me.”
“Martha,” Lily repeated.
“I don’t want his jobs, I don’t want his favors, I don’t want anything about him.”
What Martha did not want from Ryder Channing that morning was the job he had gotten her three weeks before on a Sacramento television station. It was the fourth or fifth such job for which he had arranged an interview; it was not only the first one Martha had taken but the first one, as far as Lily knew, for which she had even shown up for the initial appointment. The idea behind this particular job had been that Martha, after a month of answering letters from viewers and doing other small jobs around the station, would eventually work into doing both the morning interview program and the commercials during the afternoon movie, a job handled during the first year of the channel’s operation by the manager’s wife, now pregnant. It was, Ryder had declared, an unbeatable opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an industry with nowhere to go but up, and he had installed a borrowed television set on the sun porch so that Martha could observe the interview and commercial techniques developed by the manager’s wife, Maribeth Sidell. Martha had only to consider that Maribeth Sidell was a household word the length and breadth of the Sacramento Valley to realize, he pointed out, the future in the job.
Together, Lily and Martha had watched several of Maribeth Sidell’s programs, including one on which she interviewed, simultaneously, a retired disk jockey, Miss Sacramento, and two Japanese businessmen in the United States to arrange a trade fair. When the conversation turned to how Sacramento compared to Yokohama, Martha switched off the set and declared that she was a natural for the job. After avidly testing some of the products Maribeth advertised, in order to get what she called “fresh insights,” Martha drove into town, met Mr. Sidell, and reported at dinner that he had asked her to call him “Buzz,” had taken her to the Sacramento Hotel bar, and after two Manhattans (for him) and two sherries (for her) had announced that although she was no Jinx Falkenburg she had a lot of class and for his money ($75 a week) the ball was hers to run with. “I knew the sherry would get him,” Martha added enthusiastically. “The cornball.”
Although Lily never learned exactly where the ball had been dropped, Martha had worked only one full week and three days of last week. On the fourth day she had left the house as usual at seven-thirty, but by eleven, when Sidell called the ranch, she had not yet arrived at work.
Toward five o’clock she walked into the kitchen through the back door, runs in both her stockings and thistles caught along the hem of her white linen dress. “I was sick,” she explained shortly. “I drove to Yuba City and climbed on some rocks and watched a stretch of rapids in the Feather for a while.”
“Sidell called,” Lily said. “So did Ryder.”
“Did he.” Martha turned on the faucet in the sink and splashed water on her face and arms. “There was a dead rattlesnake caught in a backwater,” she said finally, reaching for a paper towel. “Bloated.”
When Ryder Channing called again at seven o’clock Martha at first said to tell him she was out, then, as Lily hesitated, put down her drink, reached across the table for a cigarette from Lily’s bag, and took the telephone from her.
“That’s right, I didn’t,” she said. “I didn’t feel good.”
Holding the receiver with her shoulder she lit the cigarette and made a face at Julie, who was illuminating with red and blue crayons a Standard Oil brochure addressed to Everett. “I just didn’t call, that’s all.”
“I’m not trying to do anything to you, Ryder,” she added after a pause. “It’s part of your egocentricity that you think everything I do is for the express purpose of getting on your nerves. I didn’t go in and I didn’t call and that’s all there is to it. It hasn’t got anything to do with you.” She paused, turning her face to the wall. “Ryder, I was scared. I don’t know why, I was just scared.”