As she unrolled the map, I saw that it was a blank piece of paper. She had a huge smile on her face as she peered over the top of it. From my face, though, she could tell that something was wrong. She looked down and saw that there was nothing on the map. She jumped out of the chair, she was so surprised.
“It can only be one thing,” she said. “When they mail me the tube, there’s a protective wrapper around the maps. I can’t blame this one on my husband. I have to say that in all my years of doing this, this is the stupidest mistake I’ve ever made.”
I heard the chair crack. Just a small sound, but it meant that the glue my husband used hadn’t worked. I held my breath. As she started to stand, one of the legs bent under, and the chair went down. She staggered, but caught her balance on the chest between the windows. The chest had come with the house. Never in my life had I had money for a cherry-wood chest. The dog had run into the room when the commotion started, and he was nosing the fur on her poncho when I grabbed it off the floor.
“It’s certainly not our day,” I said. I started to say how sorry I was about the chair, but suddenly she was crying, carrying on about how the community would never again be the wonderful place it once had been. She had smeared the makeup above one eye earlier, and then she rubbed the other one, so that she looked like a clown peering out through rings of soot. She was trying to get herself together, but for a few seconds it looked like a losing battle. I saw as she patted her hair that she was wearing a fall. It had come partially unfastened as she stumbled across the room.
God, it brought back memories of the days when I drank. Of that awful apartment above the grocery store with the gas leak.
Then, if you can believe it, Betty was taking me to task. She was saying that she had been unnerved by having to stop by so many times. That it was her job to drop off the items, and that she hoped I was happy that I had finally found time in my busy schedule to receive them. She grabbed up her poncho and moved her foot in such an odd way that I thought she might have been about to kick the dog, then thought better of it.
When my husband got back from cooking soil, I told him about Betty’s visit, starting at the beginning: the information about the carnival; the outdoor dances at the greenhouse. I left out the part about the retarded people, or whatever they were, because he always accused me of telling him depressing things. I skipped that and went right to the golf ball, the parking ticket, and the map. It was one of the last times my husband and I ever embraced. We had to, or we both would have fallen over laughing.
During the afternoon, the golf ball dropped off the edge of the table and rolled off to join a dust ball of similar size in the corner of the room. There was space in that house, and some lovely furniture, and sitting in the sunlight at the table that day with Betty, I knew that I was going to miss the place. We knew when we took it that we were going out on a limb financially. We just thought that a nice place might bring us luck — that it might cheer us up, and that then things might start to go our way. Betty’s visit and the chair’s collapse certainly would have become our family story if we’d stayed together, but that didn’t happen, so it became instead a story that I often remember, going over the details silently, by myself.
The map was useful for wrapping glasses — the one piece of white paper in among the newspaper.
When we left, we took nothing that wasn’t ours.
THE WORKING GIRL
This is a story about Jeanette, who is a working girl. She sometimes thinks of herself as a traveler, a seductress, a secret gourmet. She takes a one-week vacation in the summer to see her sister in Michigan, buys lace-edged silk underpants from a mail-order catalogue, and has improvised a way, in America, to make crème fraîche, which is useful on so many occasions.
Is this another story in which the author knows the main character all too well?
Let’s suppose, for a moment, that the storyteller is actually mystified by Jeanette, and only seems to stand in judgment because words come easily. Let’s imagine that in real life there is, or once was, a person named Jeanette, and that from a conversation the storyteller had with her, it could be surmised that Jeanette has a notion of freedom, though the guilty quiver of the mouth when she says “Lake Michigan” is something of a giveaway about how she really feels. If the storyteller is a woman, Jeanette might readily confide that she is a seductress, but if the author is a man, Jeanette will probably keep quiet on that count. Crème fraîche is crème fraîche, and not worth thinking about. But back to the original supposition: Let’s say that the storyteller is a woman, and that Jeanette discusses the pros and cons of the working life, calling a spade a spade, and greenbacks greenbacks, and if Jeanette is herself a good storyteller, Lake Michigan sounds exciting, and if she isn’t, it doesn’t. Let’s say that Jeanette talks about the romance in her life, and that the storyteller finds it credible. Even interesting. That there are details: Jeanette’s lover makes a photocopy of his hand and drops the piece of paper in her in-box; Jeanette makes a copy of her hand and has her trusted friend Charlie hang it in the men’s room, where it is allowed to stay until Jeanette’s lover sees it, because it means nothing to anyone else. If the storyteller is lucky, they will exchange presents small enough to be put in a breast pocket or the pocket of a skirt. Also a mini French-English/English-French dictionary (France is the place they hope to visit); a finger puppet; an ad that is published in the “personals” column, announcing, by his initials, whom he loves (her), laminated in plastic and made useful as well as romantic by its conversion into a keyring. Let’s hope, for the sake of a good story, they are wriggling together in the elevator, sneaking kisses as the bubbles rise in the watercooler, and she is tying his shoelaces together at night, to delay his departure in the morning.
Where is the wife?
In North Dakota or Memphis or Paris, let’s say. Let’s say she’s out of the picture even if she isn’t out of the picture.
No no no. Too expedient. The wife has to be there: a presence, even if she’s gone off somewhere. There has to be a wife, and she has to be either determined and brave, vile and addicted, or so ordinary that with a mere sentence of description, the reader instantly knows that she is a prototypical wife.
There is a wife. She is a pretty, dark-haired girl who married young, and who won a trip to Paris and is therefore out of town.
Nonsense. Paris?
She won a beauty contest.
But she can’t be beautiful. She has to be ordinary.
It suddenly becomes apparent that she is extraordinary. She’s quite beautiful, and she’s in Paris, and although there’s no reason to bring this up, the people who sponsored the contest do not know that she’s married.
If this is what the wife is like, she’ll be more interesting than the subject of the story.
Not if the working girl is believable, and the wife’s exit has been made credible.
But we know how that story will end.
How will it end?
It will end badly — which means predictably — because either the beautiful wife will triumph, and then it will be just another such story, or the wife will turn out to be not so interesting after all, and by default the working girl will triumph.
When is the last time you heard of a working girl triumphing?
They do it every day. They are executives, not “working girls.”