Oh, yes. Oh, definitely, to eat a peach, to gobble down a million peaches and each time to spit out the pit. A million peach-pits.
Tomorrow.
And Peggy began to cry softly into her pillow.
9
Sunday. That was the first thing that she was aware of, even before she knew quite where she was or even who she was. When she awoke in the morning she often lost herself completely, lost all awareness of time and place. One morning in Indiana she had managed to dress herself completely without quite remembering her own name.
Now when she realized it was Sunday, the second thing that occurred to her was the significance of the day. The Sabbath was not going to be a day of rest, not this week.
Sunday.
It wasn’t morning, she realized. It was past noon, one o’clock at least, and she crawled out of bed and hunted for her watch on the dresser. It was one-thirty.
She dressed in dungarees and a blouse and headed for the bathroom, yawning on the way. The reflection in the mirror didn’t even look like Jan Marlowe at first glance — her eyes were slightly bloodshot and her face drawn and tired and pale.
She was incredibly thirsty. She rarely had a hangover, but fairly heavy drinking left her thirsty enough to empty a bathtub. She filled and drained the plastic bathroom glass four times without ever really quenching her thirst.
In the kitchen she broke an egg into the stainless aluminum frying pan and spent several minutes fishing for pieces of the shell. She hardly ever managed to break an egg properly. Once years ago she had tapped one too hard on the stove and smashed it. The egg had dripped into obscurity within one of the burners, but had immortalized itself for weeks by giving off a burnt smell each time the stove was used.
That was in Indiana, the summer she had spent with her mother on the lake shore. She remembered it now, how they had gone swimming and slept on the beach in the sun, and how they laughed at the egg smell in the cottage.
While the egg was bubbling in the pan, she boiled water and made coffee and poured orange juice. She ate her breakfast at the kitchen table, thinking once again that she really had to get another table cloth soon.
Sunday.
She would meet Laura that night. Meanwhile there was time, time to do almost anything, and there was certainly plenty to do, plenty of things to see. But for some reason she didn’t want to do anything, and most of all she didn’t want to leave the apartment. The thought of meeting anyone, even a total stranger, was repelling.
But I have time to kill, she thought. How do I kill it?
As she washed the breakfast dishes in the sink she went over the previous night in her mind. It had been a good night, until all at once it went wrong and became a very bad night. Then, suddenly, it was good again, better than ever. It had been free and easy with every problem solving itself.
Now she knew what she was, and now that she knew it for a fact it seemed a good deal less frightening.
Be the best of whatever you are. That was the punch line of one of those insipid poems they taught you back in grammar school, something about being a shrub if you couldn’t make it as a pine on the top of the hill. But the line was beginning to make a little sense.
Okay, she thought. I’ll be the greatest dike in the Western world.
She dried the dishes and put them away, thinking that now the problem was solved and the course was clear enough. She wanted Laura and Laura wanted her and there was nothing in the way. The little blonde didn’t matter, Mike didn’t matter, nothing mattered. Mike wanted her, but that was immaterial now. He might even love her, but he would be able to get over it.
She poured another cup of coffee and carried it into the living room. The sun was streaming into the open window and she felt slightly exposed there, her apartment open to the eyes of any tourist who happened to be passing by. Curtains would end that, but at the same time she liked the view open as it was. She could sit alone in her own living room and still be a part of the city outside.
The apartment was stuffy now and she walked to the window and opened it. The weather was nearly perfect — sunny and cloudless but not too hot. Outside it was peaceful, with less of the continual traffic and noise that had been present during the past two days.
She pulled a chair over to the window and sat down in it. The sun came just a little way into the room, warming her legs pleasantly so that she wiggled her toes.
The coffee tasted good. Actually, she thought, it’s lousy coffee. It doesn’t really taste like coffee, and if I want good coffee I ought to learn how to make it. This is instant coffee and it tastes like instant coffee, and if it weren’t such a wonderful day it would taste like iodine.
But it didn’t. It tasted good, even if it didn’t taste particularly like coffee, and she knew that this was a sign that the day was going to be a good one.
She lit a cigarette, dropping the match out of the window to the pavement below. The cigarette and coffee went together perfectly. Like beer and pizza. Like coke and aspirin. Like love and marriage.
Like love and marriage. But love and marriage didn’t go together, not at all. Not for her, at least. Marriage? Marriage was something that would never happen, an experience she would have to pass up, a set of emotions she would not feel, not ever.
Love and marriage and children.
And that of course was another item to be passed up.
She was going to miss a good deal. No husband, no kids—
She dragged on the cigarette and inhaled deeply, trying to punish herself by drawing too much smoke into her lungs. Bad girl, she thought, coughing. It’s a beautiful day and you’ll think yourself into a headache if you don’t come off it. Give it up, kiddo.
Besides, wasn’t it better? She could have marriage and children, sure. But she wanted love and she was lucky enough to see a way to get it. And if she settled for marriage and kids she would lose the love, and didn’t love come first? Without it, weren’t the others a lie?
Yes.
Yes, and she was right and the day was beautiful. The day was beautiful and Laura was beautiful and the apartment was beautiful and she was in love. Jan Marlowe was in love. Miss Janet Marlowe of Barrow Street, formerly of Indiana.
Across the street a pair of small boys were playing handball against the brick front of a building. Two doors down the block an old woman with grey hair sat alone on the front steps. The woman wore a faded print dress and brown loafers, and Jan could see her stockings — thick, dark brown stockings that covered her heavy legs. The woman wasn’t doing any of the things old women usually did. Her hands were empty. And she didn’t seem to be looking at anything, either: her eyes stared blankly ahead.
A couple passed arm in arm, talking in whispers and pointing at things. Jan guessed that they were tourists. Strangely, she didn’t consider herself a tourist although she had been in New York only since Friday. She felt so completely at home that she thought of herself as a New Yorker, a Villager, and was aware of a vague resentment toward the tourists who were walking on her street and pointing at things.
Was Laura a New Yorker? She decided that she must be, and then she realized that all the people she had met seemed to be native to the city. She couldn’t imagine them in any other surroundings. Even the artificial ones so completely fitted into the pattern of the city that she hadn’t thought of the possibility that some of them might come from Chicago or California or New England.
Or even the Midwest, even Indiana for that matter.
Laura could be from Indiana. Jan started to laugh, amused at the notion of two little hicks rushing to New York to crawl into bed together.