them Page 4

  “Out.”

  “With who?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I do. I want to know.”

  Loretta folded her arms. She felt like a heroine in a movie, confronted by a jealous husband in a kitchen while outside the camera is aching to draw back and show a wonderland of adventures waiting for her—long, frantic rides on trains, landscapes of wounded soldiers, a lovely white desert across which a camel caravan draped voluptuously in veils moves slowly with a kind of mincing melancholy, the steamy jungles of India opening before British officers in white, young officers, the mysteries of English drawing-rooms cracking before the quick, humorless smirk of a wise young woman from America….

  Brock was staring at her. She watched as his jaws ground the food she’d made for him, and she had the idea that he wasn’t tasting it. That was Brock’s problem—he never tasted anything.

  “If it’s any of your business,” she said, “I’m going to see Sissy.”

  “Sissy?” Brock said. Sissy was an old friend of Loretta’s who was not pretty like Loretta, whose waist was thick, who went about in embroidered blouses her grandmother made—a half-blind old woman who never left her room—and who therefore had an outdated European peasant look, a blunt, innocent look, very dull. Sissy herself was a nice girl. About her Brock could never say anything bad, his mind simply stopped. So he stared at Loretta.

  “We’re going to cut out patterns for a dress. She’s going to help me,” Loretta said.

  “You’re lying.”

  “I am not lying!”

  Brock lifted the food to his mouth with the natural fastidiousness of someone who dislikes eating. He grinned at her suddenly. “You know, I been hearing some things about you, sweetheart.”

  “What things?”

  “You know.”

  “I don’t give a damn. It’s all lies.”

  “Bernie Malin, is that a lie?”

  Loretta felt her face get hot. “What about him? Did you talk to him?”

  “I wouldn’t talk with a punk like that! What is he, sixteen years old? A punk like that? Somebody said you and him were fooling around not too long ago.”

  “Let them talk.”

  “Don’t you go bringing him up here.”

  “I don’t bring anybody up here, not to this dump.”

  “Well, don’t.”

  “Maybe I already have—what then? Maybe I already did bring him!”

  “Did you?”

  “What business is it of yours? I live here, I come and go by myself, on my own, I work and make my own money. I don’t have to take any shit from you. If you don’t like it you can move out! A twenty-year-old punk yourself! Why don’t you move out anyway?”

  “So Bernie can move in?”

  “Oh, the hell with that!” Loretta was flushed and beneath her anger, rather pleased. “Bernie’s all right,” she said. “I like him. But he’s nothing special. I told you I was just going to see Sissy. I don’t fool around with kids like him and get a bad reputation. When I get married it won’t be to any kid like that.”

  Brock had finished eating. He pushed his plate away, in the manner of his father and other men they knew; there was something about the gesture that both irritated Loretta and made her want to laugh. They were so predictable!

  “Seems to me you’re pretty interested in my business,” Loretta said. “Don’t you have any business of your own to worry about?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you take some girl out yourself? Why don’t you spend a little money? All you do is play pinball and stand around with those asshole friends of yours that even you can see are dopes. What’s wrong with you anyway?”

  “I am a mystery to myself,” Brock said, smiling coldly.

  “Oh, if you’re going to talk crazy!”

  She took his plate from him and put it in the sink. Stacked in the sink were a half-dozen dishes, some of them still crusted with food; silverware lay in a heap. One of the forks was caught under a plate and made the whole pile uneven. The very slowness of Loretta’s movements, the very fact of the cramped little kitchen built up a pressure in her, in her bones. She was uneasy. She did not really mind. She did not even mind Brock’s teasing, which she was used to anyway and which never came to anything. All her life she had been teased. Children were teased, especially girls; it was inescapable. Before her father had gotten bad he had teased her and made her cry, without meaning to, and she remembered her grandfather, too, bothering her, pulling her hair, a mean-smelling old man with stained whiskers who fought with her grandmother, shouting and shrieking in another language. That past was connected with another city, a slummy two-family house across from a coal yard where all the kids played, and with a different kind of work—optimistic work, like the kind her grandfather had had. He had made thousands of dollars in a single month with his construction crew and then lost it all in a way Loretta could never figure out and didn’t care much about—because to her and to the other women in the family it was lost and that was that—an incontestable and somehow respectable fact! That old man had teased her lovingly, and she’d had enough sense to know that he loved her, so when he died she had not pulled away like Brock from the bed where he had been pleading for them—she’d been right there. And her own father had teased her in that curious way, showing love, while her mother had scraped pans angrily and dropped things in the sink to let them break, showing what she thought of fooling around and of love when there was so much work to be done, always. Then the whole family had picked up and moved themselves to this city in a hired truck, and in the very room next to this kitchen Loretta’s mother had died five years ago. Now the old man slept there alone. Had it ever really been a death-room? Nobody could tell, nobody could really remember except Brock. He liked to say, “The old man killed her,” and Loretta was sure to shout back, “Like hell he did! She’s the one who killed him,” as if it were important to get things straight, to get at the truth. What was the truth?

  Lying around the house were old snapshots of her father: a dark-haired man with a smiling, quizzical look. The man who stumbled around this miserable apartment and was sick in the bathroom and in bed and who whined for Loretta all the time (what had he done with that money he’d saved, for example?), was not the same man, sorry to say. Two different men, two different times. Once he had worked with a construction crew, building houses, dozens and dozens of houses, tacking up siding and building garages with yellow trim, and he had had his own car, and when things had started caving in, all the relatives had told him enviously, “Well, people will always need houses to live in!”—which turned out not to be true. Houses were not built, half-built houses stayed half built, until kids pillaged them or the weather itself beat them down. It was 1930. It was 1931. Loretta’s father went to work as a night watchman but he lost that job in a few months to someone’s brother-in-law—“Likely story,” his wife said—and after that he worked wherever he could get a job, even selling papers. Loretta remembered all those years. And then, when younger people began getting jobs again, back from government projects and optimistic from the government checks that became as regular and permanent as the cycle of the seasons itself, her father had gone back to building. But the times weren’t quite right yet and so he waited a few years, and the times never got quite right for him. He was terrified and couldn’t make sense of his terror, so he had started drinking. The young men who had jobs didn’t keep them either, because the times backed up and shook people off, but Loretta’s father kept drinking and finally he was a kind of aged youngish man of the type Loretta often saw on Sunday mornings, sleeping in the doorways of churches or closed shops. That was that. A change, a different man. A new man. When he got a job with a warehouse, unloading trucks, he’d come back home at noon on the first day, explaining that he had dropped a carton of glassware and then admitting that he hadn’t dropped anything because he had been afraid to try, afraid o
f dropping it and getting into debt for it. And so he kept on until the present, coming and going and not really getting in Loretta’s way unless he was sick to his stomach or made a mess of some kind.

  “Well, don’t you get in any trouble tonight,” Brock said.

  “Don’t you.”

  She followed him into his room, the “parlor,” because there was something not finished yet between them. She didn’t know what. In her blue dress, with her hair shining and wavy, she felt that she had a right to get things clear with him. Brock took a comb out of his pocket and flicked it through his hair quickly, returning it to his pocket in almost the same gesture. His hair, long unwashed, was never mussed and kept the same shape for weeks. He put some kind of hair lotion on it that made Loretta think of bicycle wheels, the grease that gets on your fingers from them. Impulsively she touched his coat pocket. She felt the weight of the gun inside.

  “So you’ve still got that gun!”

  Brock pushed her away.

  “Really, what’s going on?” Loretta said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “But what are you going to do?” She stared at him. For the first time she wondered if he was serious.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  The cheekbones of his pale, lean face looked particularly sharp; it was as if the bones of his face were thinking for him.

  “You’re going to get in some trouble,” Loretta said. She spoke in the fatal, final, partly satisfied singsong her mother and other women in the family had used, as if they’d already come to the end of all the worst possibilities and were waiting there for the men to catch up.

  “No, I’m not. I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Brock said. He took out the gun and weighed it in the palm of his hand. Was it real? Loretta stared, swallowing hard. It did look real. It was a cheap tarnished revolver, with a snub barrel and a badly worn wooden grip. Loretta had seen a similar revolver when she’d been at her cousin Irma’s house and she’d walked into the kitchen where some guys were hanging out, and on the table was a gun. She’d been so scared, she’d smiled. She was smiling now, her heart quickening.

  “If you give it to me—I’ll hide it for you, Brock.”

  Brock laughed, pulling away.

  “Why’d I give it to you? Think I’m craz-y?”

  “What if—Pa finds it? His hands so shaky what if he shoots himself? If he drops it—”

  “Pa won’t find it.”

  “Why are you grinning like that?”

  “Who, me?”

  “You asshole! This isn’t funny.”

  “So who’s laughing?” The corners of Brock’s mouth were upturned like a malevolent clown’s; his cheeks were bunched muscles. A mottled flush had risen in his sickly pale skin.

  “Brock, are you going to—wait for Pa? Start a fight?”

  “Nope. I got better things to do.”

  “When he comes in drunk you’re going to start a fight? Are you?”

  “I don’t start those fights, he does.”

  “You look at him like you do. Come on, Brock!”

  “I told you, kid. I got better things to do.” Brock patted in the direction of his crotch. Meaning getting laid. Fat chance!

  Loretta said quickly, “He’ll be out all night, for sure. He’ll be back in the morning, a mess. Look, you’re not going to hurt him, are you?”

  “I said no.”

  “Why are you acting so crazy then?”

  He laughed and put the gun back in his pocket. He was ready to leave.

  “Well, go on, go out! Get out of here!” Loretta cried.

  When he left she wandered back to her room to check her appearance. Perspiration had gathered in little beads on her forehead—she hated that. She dabbed them off with a handkerchief. Thinking about Brock got no one anywhere, she knew that; he’d been in and out of Children’s Court years ago and he’d been picked up and kept overnight in jail many times; it had no effect on him either to make him wiser or shrewder, and other people’s thinking about him had no effect either. What he liked best was to sit and read newspapers and let the papers fall to the floor when he was finished with them. But he never talked about what he read, never said anything. He had secrets. With his stupid friends he could bellow and snicker like any idiot, but that was a disguise too, they didn’t know him and nobody knew him, and consequently nobody exactly trusted him. Loretta pushed him out of her mind and leaned closer to the mirror, so close that her breath made a fine film on it, and the image that stared back at her with watchful, expectant eyes was the only subject of interest to her soul.

  Was her face beautiful?

  It was getting late. She began to hurry. All the wonders of the street crowded to her mind, which was already a little wild from the nonsense with her brother, and she caressed her freckled arm slowly, fondly, not thinking. She simply stood in the dim little bedroom as if she were taking a confused, final leave of it, not thinking. She was Loretta. It did not upset her that other girls like herself popped up everywhere, healthy and ready for a laugh, ready for a good time after a week of work; she liked the fact that there were so many Lorettas, that she’d seen two girls in one week with a sailor outfit like her own, and a hundred girls with curly hair flung back over their shoulders! Her girl friend Sissy was the only girl who wore those heavy embroidered blouses, beautiful blouses with scarlet and green and yellow threads woven silkily into designs of peacocks and windmills, and Sissy would never meet herself coming and going, but Loretta was not Sissy, Loretta was Loretta. She put some more lipstick on and went out.

  Walking down the street, she felt her very heels buoyed by the tense gaiety of Saturday night. Everyone was out! She half expected to see Brock skulking about at the corner, where he and his friends sometimes stood, and she wouldn’t have been surprised to see her father sitting on someone’s front stoop with his arms hanging down between his thin knees, given up, a wreck, asleep with his eyes open. She didn’t see them but she saw everyone else. The calves of her legs took strength from the hard, hot flatness of the sidewalk, everyone’s sidewalk, and she smiled and shot greetings out to people airing themselves after supper—she knew everyone and everyone knew her. It wasn’t such a bad neighborhood. Her mother had hated it, but the neighborhood wasn’t bad; people just liked to walk around a little and relax after a long week, and sometimes they got into trouble, but it didn’t last. There was nothing wrong with that.

  From Monday until Saturday noon Loretta’s back and shoulders and arms ached from her work, and her hair had to be pulled back in a miserable frazzled knot, and she knew she was nothing much to look at, but on Saturday night everything was changed. The men took off their dirty workclothes and put on cheap-stylish clothes like Brock’s, shined their shoes, manipulated their hair into place; the unmarried girls did over their faces with tweezers and eyebrow pencils and rouge and anything else on hand, and put ribbons in their hair in imitation of a movie star or let their hair slide over one eye in imitation of another movie star—and all this was marvelous, all this was wonderful! Loretta believed that the very universe opened up on Saturday night, that the tight little secretive cells burst into lovely buds. Who would want to be a prude? What kind of losers (girls from Loretta’s parish school, which she had quit last spring) would go around at this time trying to sell salve in transparent blue jars with religious pictures thrown in free, or trying to sell tickets for a church raffle?

  This was a small city in northeastern Ohio, on a canal, and it had grown up jaggedly around the canal, spreading out in two irregular half-moons, with bumps and hollows of still vacant land and other stretches of crowded and devastated tenement areas. The main business was a “little steel” plant that employed men in a quarter of the city’s families, and factories of other types and railroad yards and big warehouses were within range of Loretta’s eyes, had she cared to cli
mb to the top of her building and stare out over the warm haze of that evening. The air was hazy, yes, but melodic also, and rich with mysterious odors—a giant bakery down the street gave off a continuous smell of ferment that slightly tainted every one’s taste, but still there were odors of flowers that were invisible and rich home-baking from open street-level windows and, by the Dwight Corner Tavern, a pleasant stale smell of beer and roast beef. Even across the street and down by the first of the bridges there was a carnival sense of abandon in the air, slightly stirred by the colorless waters beneath and the steady harsh falling of water from the locks. Had Loretta more time, or had there been fewer men hanging around, she would certainly have leaned dreamily on the bridge railing to watch the water pour through the locks—she’d done this hundreds of times—for everyone was eager, in the monotonous, fascinated way of people who live in cities built around canals, to see what kind of boat was coming through and whether anyone would dare toss a bottle or a piece of junk down onto it. But she passed across the curving bridge with hardly a glance down at the troubled waters far below—this bridge was very high above the canal, dizzyingly high—and she passed by the playground of the Catholic school she had gone to for years, marked off with high wire fences on which the kids had climbed all the time, and she passed the school itself, toward which she hardly glanced—really, Loretta no longer saw it—and on past the small group of men hanging around the firehouse in their shirt sleeves, some of them friends of her father’s, and she paused to talk with them, laughing shyly and lowering her glance, stepping back in the brief pause of a conversation to let them know she had somewhere to go, she didn’t really have time to spend with them. Loretta Botsford, and how she was growing up! In their eyes she was nearly grown up, which was a matter of lipstick and a certain self-conscious swing of her shoulders and hips, exactly in the style of the day—they acknowledged her, they let her go.

  Sissy’s mother had a flat just above a drugstore on Main Street, which was no better than where Loretta herself lived. It was about five minutes away. So she had five minutes of a kind of wild, open freedom during which anything might happen. On the street men were driving by and might have been glancing at her, but she didn’t look at them, and anyway most of them would be with girls at this time on Saturday night; she looked ahead at the front of the clinic, to which she and Brock had taken their father ten or twelve times at least—a nightmare, that place, with small cubicles whose walls didn’t even reach to the ceiling, and tired ugly nurses, and doctors her friend Rita called crooks since the time one of her babies had died of an ear infection. They were butchers, bastards, crooks. All of them had money; such people had money because each patient was two dollars, and two dollars a head added up. It made you dizzy to think of all that money. And dentists were just as bad, or maybe they were worse. She never thought about her teeth, which were bad; she didn’t dare let herself think about those dull, relentless aches that paralyzed her some nights, going right to the bottom of her jaw, and her gums sometimes bled when she brushed her teeth—no, better not think of that, better forget it. She sucked ice when the pain got bad. When it got too bad she had the tooth yanked and paid three or four dollars and that was that.