Margaret Millar
Wives and Lovers
For Lydia and Don Freeman
1
In hot weather Hazel liked to sit in the dental chair. Its leather arms and back were cool and there was a fan in the ceiling above it. She loosened the belt of her uniform and leaned back, listening to the hum of the fan and thinking what a fine place it was to sit and realize that except for one bicuspid she didn’t have a filling in her head.
From the adjoining room she could hear sharp metallic sounds and the gurgling of water in a basin. Presently the gurgling stopped and Gordon Foster called, “Hazel?”
“Coming.”
She climbed out of the chair and, tightening her belt, followed Gordon’s voice into the lab. It was a shoebox of a room, with the ceiling pressed down on it like a lid, and Gordon and herself, two mis-mated shoes, tossed together into the box by a careless clerk.
“Did you want something?”
“No.”
“You called.”
“I thought you might have gone home.”
“It’s too hot to move. This is the hottest August I’ve ever experienced.” She said this each August, and many times each August, but it always seemed true. “Besides, I brought my lunch.”
Gordon looked up from the bridge he was repairing, his eyebrows raised. He didn’t talk much when he was working but he often asked silent questions with his brows: Why don’t you eat it, then?
“Thin people like you,” Hazel said, dabbing at the sweat that trickled down behind her ears, “don’t mind the heat so much.”
“You could eat your lunch out on the grass where it’s cooler.”
“I prefer to stay inside.”
“Oh.”
“The ants. It’s a bad year for ants.”
Hazel sat on a stool sipping a Coke and looking without appetite at the sandwich she had brought for lunch. Some of the starch that had gone out of her uniform and out of Hazel herself seemed to have found its way into the sandwich. The bread had curled at the edges and the peanut butter filling had dried and stiffened like buckram.
She held the cold bottle of Coke against her forehead for a moment. “Air conditioning would be nice.”
“I suppose it would.”
“Maybe next summer.”
He glanced at her questioningly — next summer? When is that? — then turned away with a sigh. Hazel was not sure whether the sigh meant that she was to be quiet or that next summer seemed a long sad year away.
“Dr. Foster—”
He shook his head. “Elaine says we can’t afford an air conditioner.” Elaine was his wife, and the final authority on office as well as personal expenditures.
“I know. I wasn’t going to talk any more about that.”
“Good.”
“I just wanted to say, well, the last few weeks you haven’t been yourself.”
He smiled. He had extraordinarily good teeth for a dentist. “Who have I been?”
“I mean it.” Hazel looked stubborn and unamused. “You’ve lost weight and your color’s not good. Those are bad signs in a man your age.”
He was thirty-eight, three years younger than Hazel, and sometimes Hazel felt like his mother and sometimes she felt like a mere sprite of a girl beside him. They were never contemporaries.
“Bad signs,” she repeated. “You ought to go through one of the clinics and get checked up.”
“And you ought to get married again, to some nice fellow who enjoys being fussed over.”
“You think I’m fussing?”
“Like an old hen.”
“I don’t usually.”
“No.”
“So I must have a good reason for doing it now.”
“The reason is, you’re a nice normal woman and you don’t feel alive unless you’re fussing over someone.”
“I’ve never heard you talk like this before. It just goes to show, things aren’t right.”
“No,” he said. “No, things aren’t right.”
She opened her mouth to speak again, but he had turned his back, and his white starched coat was like a blank whitewashed wall.
The buzzer sounded from the front door and Hazel went to answer it, moving heavily on her heat-swollen feet.
She said over her shoulder, “I could make an appointment for you at the clinic.”
“No, thanks.”
“But if things aren’t right—”
“I need a rest, that’s all.”
“I’m glad you’re admitting it. You haven’t had any time off since I came here.”
“Yes, I have. I went up to San Francisco for the convention in June.”
“Just three days. That’s no holiday.”
He didn’t answer. But his shoulders were shaking, as if he was laughing silently to himself. He did that quite frequently lately, laughed to himself, and it annoyed Hazel not to know what the joke was. She never asked him, though, because she was a little afraid that he might tell her and that it wouldn’t be quite so funny spoken out loud.
The buzzer sounded again and she went out through the hall to the waiting room. Since it was the doctor’s afternoon off, the Venetian blinds were closed tight and the front door was locked.
Hazel opened it, squinting against the sudden sun.
“The doctor is not— Oh, it’s you.”
The girl said, very brightly and gaily, “Yes, it’s me,” as if she had enjoyed every moment standing on the roofless stucco porch in the blazing noon. Her face looked stiff; the sun seemed to have squeezed all the moisture out of it. In her right hand she carried a suitcase with “Ruby MacCormick” printed on the side in black crayon, and across her left forearm was a red fox fur.
“Me again,” she said blithely. “Is the doctor—?”
“He’s working in the lab.”
“I won’t disturb him then. I only — all I want is some place to sit down for a minute and think. I can’t seem to think in this weather.”
“It’s cooler inside.”
“I won’t bother you.” The girl stepped inside and put the suitcase on the floor and laid the red fox across it. “It’s just, I want to sit for a minute. I’ve been walking. The suitcase is very heavy. I ought to have taken a taxi, except I wasn’t sure where I was going.”
Hazel closed the door. “You’re leaving town?”
“No. No, I’m moving. The establishment where I’ve been staying, well, it’s awfully low class. Not what I’m used to. If Mummy and Daddy ever found out, well, they’d kill me. I’m used to nice things.”
“I’ll get you some water.”
“No. No, I don’t want to bother you, Miss Philip. I was just passing and I remembered how kind you were last week and I thought I’d drop in and thank you and then be on my way.”
“What way, if you don’t know where you’re going?”
“There must be places for a girl of my background.”
Hazel didn’t know what her background was. She’d met her only once before, the previous Friday. She had come to the office early in the morning and Gordon had introduced her to Hazel as Ruby MacCormick, a friend of one of his nieces from up north. As it turned out, Gordon himself had arranged the meeting because Ruby was out of a job and he thought Hazel might be able to suggest some type of employment. Ruby was very young and untrained, and the only possibility Hazel could think of was the Beachcomber, a restaurant out on the wharf which was operated, and partly owned, by her ex-husband, George. Because of his temper, and the influx of summer tourists, George was constantly plagued by a shortage of waitresses and he was willing to try anyone who could walk and count up to ten. Ruby could do both.
Hazel poured some water from the cooler and the girl drank it thirstily. She was so thin that her Adam’s apple was prominent as a boy’s, and moved up and down when she swallowed.