“You can’t drown gophers.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve tried.”
“They can’t swim, can they? If they can’t swim, they got to drown, don’t they?”
“All right, Harold, you win. Next Sunday you go out and catch all the gophers and we’ll take them down to the ocean and throw them in.”
“Harold isn’t concerned with a minor trifle like the water bill,” Ruth said contemptuously. “Water costs money. This is desert country, and don’t you forget it. Everybody forgets that this is desert country because water has been brought in to irrigate it. But it’s still desert country.”
“So what,” Harold muttered, very softly. He was afraid of Ruth because she sometimes said very intelligent and forceful things. Like that about desert country. Harold admired that. He saw himself down at the plant addressing the manager, or even the president. Gentlemen, said Harold, don’t you forget that this is desert country.
Ruth took a sack of potatoes from the vegetable bin and began to peel them very quickly as if supper had to be prepared immediately. The kitchen clock on the wall said ten minutes after three, and supper was at least two hours away. But Ruth had a clock inside herself which never corresponded to the others in the house. Ruth’s clock ran fast and Ruth had to run fast to keep up with it. All day she ran, and part of the night; in her sleep her legs and arms twitched and she breathed so hard she woke herself up. There seemed to be no resting place for her, no safety zone where she could pause from the pursuit and catch her breath, no moments of peace except the rare ones when she was alone with the two things she loved best, the Fosters’ baby boy and the little mongrel she’d bought at the city pound for two dollars.
The dog lolled against her legs as she stood peeling the potatoes, and the warmth of its body touched cold, loveless places and slowed the clock a little.
Harold said, “I just remembered, a fellow down at the plant told me about some stuff the other day. You spray this junk on, see, and what happens is, it kills all the weeds but not the flowers.”
“I don’t believe it,” Ruth said. “I don’t believe that about the jungle and the native women, either.”
Harold looked injured. “Well, for crying out loud, I’m not making it up.”
“You’re gullible, Harold. You’ve always been gullible.”
Harold didn’t know what gullible meant, and Ruth knew he didn’t know. She stared at him in triumph until Harold dropped his eyes.
“I wonder how much he charges,” Hazel said.
Ruth put down the paring knife. “Who?”
“The Mexican gardener that works next door.”
“Have you gone out of your mind? Hiring somebody to do a little job like digging?... You must be crazy, Hazel. Why, Harold’s going to do it. He promised, next Sunday. Aren’t you, Harold?”
“Sure, I am. Sure.”
“There,” Ruth said. “He’s promised on his word of honor he’ll do it on Sunday. Won’t you, Harold?”
“Absolutely.”
Hazel walked back to the table and sat down with great deliberation.
“Listen, you two. Who’s running this joint? Who pays most of the bills? Who owns the house?”
“Well, I didn’t say anything, Haze,” Harold said anxiously. “I hardly opened my mouth.”
“You better not. It’s my house, and if I want it to look respectable, by Jesus it’s going to look respectable!”
“Sure, sure it is.”
“And if I want flowers around it, by Jesus I’m going to have flowers around it, see?”
“You bet you are, Haze.”
“Distinction, that’s what I want, a distinguished-looking house with some class to it.”
“People in our circumstances hiring a gardener,” Ruth said bitterly.
“I didn’t say for sure I was going to. I said I wonder how much he charges.”
“A dollar an hour, at least a dollar an hour. And a Mexican, at that. Why, I–I just wouldn’t feel safe in the house if he was out there.”
“Why not?”
“You can’t trust them, any of them... Of course I realize I have no voice in the matter. I’m living on your charity for the present.”
“Baloney,” Hazel said kindly. Her irritation had passed. She was always happiest when she was following her impulses and her current impulse was to hire the Mexican gardener and live in a distinguished-looking house waiting for a distinguished-looking millionaire.
Hazel rarely suffered from second thoughts. Once a decision was made, it seemed good, and Hazel stuck by it the way she stuck by her friends.
A nice yard would (a) increase the value of the house, (b) look pretty, (c) show up the neighbors, and (d) provide a suitable background for gentlemen friends.
Humming to herself Hazel went out into the back yard, gathered up all the broken halves of beer bottles sticking out of the gopher holes, and threw them in the trash can. Then she went over to the house next door and rang the front doorbell.
Half an hour later she returned with a pleasant glow induced by two glasses of cooking sherry, and a piece of paper bearing the address and phone number of Santana Escobar. She stood looking out of the kitchen window at the back yard. Tomorrow, Hazel thought, everything would be different; the muss and clutter would be gone, and the whole place would be blooming with gardenias and camellias, no more of those lousy geraniums.
Santana. The very name sounded prophetic, a symbol of a brand-new life. She had no clear plans for this new life beyond the fact that it would be different from the old one, and that at some point in it her millionaire would turn up, or at least someone with a little money like Mr. Cooke.
It’s the beginning, Hazel thought solemnly. It’s the beginning of a new life.
She wanted to communicate this thought to someone, not to Ruth who would blame it on the sherry, or to Harold and Josephine who had their own new life cut out for them, but to someone like George. George was very keen on new beginnings. He would understand perfectly.
She phoned the Beachcomber.
“George?”
“George isn’t here. Who’s that?”
“It’s me, Willie. Hazel.”
“Oh, hello, Hazel. This business about George, well, he left about an hour ago. Didn’t say where he was going, just walked off. There was some rumpus in the kitchen. He fired one of the girls. He lost his temper. You know George, he gets fussed up. Then, wham.”
“You said it, wham. Which girl did he fire, Willie?”
“One of the new ones. I forget her name.”
“Ruby?”
“Could well have been Ruby. Anyway, we’re short one girl and we’re short George. If you run into him anywhere, tell him we’ve got a crowd here, will you?”
“I’ll do that, Willie. So long.”
Hazel put down the phone.
In spite of George’s defection, it was still the beginning of a new life, and since Harold had gone back to work and Josephine was still asleep there was no one to tell but Ruth. She told Ruth.
“You shouldn’t drink in the afternoon,” Ruth said.
5
“Ruby? Let me think a minute.” Mrs. Freeman paused, searching for Ruby amid the tissue of fact and fiction that enveloped her mind.
“Ruby MacCormick,” George said.
“Oh, that’s our new girl, yes. We get so many here. They come and go. I hardly have time to catch their names.”
“I’d like to speak to her.”
“Now let me think, is she in or out? Wait a minute and I’ll go see. Sit down on the porch and make yourself easy.”
“Thank you.”
George sat down on a redwood bench beside the sign that identified the house: “Mrs. Freeman’s Tourist Home, Ladies Only, Reasonable Rates, Ocean View.” The bench creaked under his weight and he got up again, brushing off the seat of his trousers. He didn’t actually want to sit down anyway. He wanted to do something violent, to run away as fast as he could. But at the same time he wanted to have Ruby running along beside him, just as violent as he. He gazed blindly at Mrs. Freeman’s Ocean View — nineteen blocks down the highway a tiny strip of sea was visible — and wondered what he could say to Ruby to make everything all right.