Still Wanda Jo knew that he was going down to Tulsa. She was aware that the board had sent him to the convention. But I don’t believe she thought much about it. No one did. It was simply part of his new responsibilities as manager of the elevator. To Wanda Jo, then, it must have been merely that he would be gone for the weekend and that she would miss their weekly dancing and drinking and later their lovemaking in the back bedroom. So perhaps while he was gone she decided to make good use of her time. Perhaps she gave her little house a thorough cleaning; maybe she had a permanent curl put into her hair and did things like balance her checkbook and sew buttons on one of Jack’s shirts. Then it would have been Monday and Jack would have been due to come back.
Except that he didn’t come back on Monday. He was still in Tulsa on Monday. He was busy. He was occupied. He was having his blood tested. He was pulling strangers in out of the courthouse hallways to act as witnesses, and he was standing up in front of an unknown justice of the peace, promising the twenty-year-old girl beside him whom he had known now for maybe forty-eight hours that he would continue to love her and take care of her, whether they ever got rich or not, whether they managed to stay well or happened to turn sick, till death did them part. So it was late on Wednesday night before he returned to Holt. It was long after midnight and consequently for another night Wanda Jo Evans must have given up waiting for a phone call that didn’t come and she must have gone to bed at last, in confusion and wonderment, beginning now to worry. But finally she must have gone to sleep. Then the next day she discovered that he was married.
It was Joyce Penner, one of the women at the telephone office where Wanda Jo worked, who told her. Joyce heard about it in the bakery. About nine-thirty that morning Joyce walked around the corner to Bradbury’s Bakery on Main Street, to buy sweet rolls for the women in the telephone office, and by that time people in town were already talking about it. So, as we all heard later, Joyce went back immediately, without even buying the rolls for the women. Reentering the telephone office she leaned over Wanda Jo’s desk and said: “Honey, come back to the ladies’ with me.”
“What’s wrong?” Wanda Jo said. “Is something wrong?”
“Just come back to the ladies’ with me.”
“Well. Something must be wrong,” Wanda Jo said.
But Joyce was already walking away from her, past the other women at their desks. Wanda Jo stood up and followed Joyce back to the rest room, to that little square pragmatic space where there is no window, where there is barely room enough for one person and the fan comes on according to code when the light switch is turned on and it makes a tinny noise, and then Joyce locked the door behind them and told Wanda Jo to sit down. “Why?” Wanda Jo said.
“Just do,” Joyce said. And then she told her.
So I suppose bad news can be lethal for some people. Especially if it is sudden and unexpected. That is, if you are not used to it, if you have gone along passively, hoping for the best despite all the evidence to the contrary, if you are twenty-nine years old and still believe that a man will marry you simply because you have washed his dirty socks for eight years and have slept with him on Saturday nights during all that time, then I suppose bad news can kill you. In any case it was something like that for Wanda Jo Evans. Because, in a way, Wanda Jo Evans did die that Thursday morning in April. I do not mean that she slit her wrists with a lady’s razor that she happened to be carrying in her purse, nor that she did anything so suicidal as to stab herself with a fingernail file. I simply mean that she stopped caring what happened to herself anymore.
It began immediately. For the rest of that morning she sat in the telephone office rest room, staring at the tiled floor, wiping her nose on cheap toilet paper, crying quietly, her recently curled strawberry blonde hair fallen forward about her abashed and stricken face and her slim white neck bowed and exposed as if she were waiting for some final blow of some Holt County inquisitor’s ax. All of that — that dreadful individual remorse and despair and submission — while the fan overhead went on making its maddening little noise and while the other women out in the front office continued to talk about her and to send a representative from among themselves every fifteen minutes or so to check on her. She stayed in the rest room all that morning. Then at noon one of the women drove her home.
For the rest of that spring she drank. In the evenings she went home after work and sat in front of the television, drinking cheap wine or vodka until she fell asleep. And on the weekends that spring she went out to the bars in town, going out alone now to the same places where previously she and Jack had gone together. Invariably she drank until the bars were closed. Then, in time, she began to take someone home with her too. She brought them back to that little bedroom in the house on Chicago Street, and the bed wasn’t even made anymore and the sheets smelled of sweat and the stale smoke of old cigarettes. But none of that was important to her now. It was only important to her that he — whoever he was, and there were a lot of them during those months of late spring and early summer, and even occasionally more than one at the same time — it was only important that he do his own laundry. She insisted on that.
By June she was a mess. She was completely lost and pitiable. And people in Holt did pity her too — the women, in particular, but some of the men as well, when they thought about it. They all felt sorry for her. But no one knew what to do for her either. Finally, however, some unexpected help came from the outside. It came in the guise of a little mousy middle-aged man who wore horn-rimmed glasses and a white shirt and tie: a Mr. T. Bleven McGill. He was a telephone company supervisor and it turned out that he had a heart. T. Bleven McGill persuaded Wanda Jo to apply for a transfer to another office. Thus, at the end of June in 1971, she moved to Pueblo. And so far as I know she is there still.
But before she left she did one thing — something which has become a part of Holt County legend too — she delivered that last brown paper bag of clothes to Jack. They were all clean and dutifully laundered of course. In fact they still smelled faintly of soap. She had washed them during that week just prior to the time that Jack had gone down to Tulsa to the manager’s convention, and naturally when he returned he hadn’t thought to pick them up. Now Wanda Jo presented them to him one afternoon while he was at the elevator office. Bob Thomas and several other men were there too. She didn’t say anything to Jack, nor to any of the others. She merely set the bag on the counter, looked at Jack, stared at him, met his eyes, and then swept her glance over the other men. Finally she turned and walked out.
After she had gone Burdette looked inside the paper bag. He recognized the contents; they were his clothes all right, but they had been changed. They had been cut by a razor or by a pair of scissors, sliced methodically, bitterly, into tiny pieces, the biggest of which was no larger than a single square in a checkerboard or a little girl’s hair ribbon: all his socks and shirts and pants and underwear. Burdette dumped the things out onto the counter.
“Huh,” he said to other men in the office. “You reckon this means we’re through? You suppose this means she won’t be doing my laundry no more?”
Bob Thomas and a couple of the men laughed.
“But hell,” Jack said. “She was a nice girl. Only she always was a little short on a sense of humor.”
PART TWO
6
She was the exact opposite of what people in Holt thought she would be. That is, she was the exact opposite of what people in Holt thought she would have to be. If Burdette was going to marry her, if he was going to leave someone as beautiful and selfless and long-suffering as Wanda Jo Evans was and then marry someone else, she would have to be something. At the very least she would have to be some husky-voiced Oklahoma version of Jayne Mansfield or Marilyn Monroe.