In the café a white-haired woman is smiling at a little girl at the next table, who grins back playfully all during breakfast. The child’s mother, in a suit, silk blouse, and sneakers for the walk to work, has noticed the attention to her daughter. On the way out, she says to the older woman as they pass her table, “Should we keep her?”
The woman, May, sits very still, blank. “She is pretty cute, isn’t she?” prompts the mother in the same bright, practical voice, turning the child by the shoulders now with her fingertips. The little girl has a pointed chin, rosy cheeks, and very fair hair, frizzy and full of static. In the sun pouring through the skylight the hair sputters off her head in all directions. She’s about four years old. She rolls her brown eyes, swings her lunchbox, and teeters against the mother.
It is late April, bright in the morning. Outside the window there is so much light and shade striping pavement and buses and people hurrying to work, so many pigeons flying and reflections weltering in the panes across the street, that it is confusing to look.
May has been taken by surprise. She can’t move. As an ex-teacher of English, who goes at least twice a week to the movies, she prides herself on knowing city talk. Should we keep her? When the mother and daughter have paid their check she sits still, holding her coffee cup. They appear outside the window on the sidewalk, the little fiery-headed girl now stalking forward with her lunchbox, ahead of the mother. Down the flickering street. Farther down, the runaways are already sitting cross-legged against the Copy Center in their silver-studded black clothes. The child marches away. Not to be kept. To be traded, like Joseph into the caravan.
Why did the woman say that to May? To May, who sometimes looks into the bathroom mirror in the morning, and despite what she sees at that hour, at her age, hears her mother’s voice say, “You’re my real darling.”
Suddenly it’s clear. The woman was joking, a commonplace joke: should we keep her? May’s reaction, her incomprehension: could she have had one of those ministrokes with which her doctor has threatened her? She has already had a little episode at the office. She leans back, winded. If somebody says, “Should we keep her?” ever again she’ll say shrewdly, “Well, I don’t know, does she eat her vegetables?” Or if the child has a gleam of mischief in her eye, she can say with a cackle, “You give her to me, I have just the place to put her.” She isn’t a know-nothing old woman keeping herself occupied at breakfast as long as possible. She is on her way to work too. Some years ago she retired from teaching, but in no time at all she landed in a computer class. Several companies in the city got together to develop the program, known as Senior Class, which won an award for returning older people to the workplace.
Her gaze falls on her hands, the nails painted—imperfectly, she sees now—a red-pink. In the position of her fingers she can read exactly what it was like to hold a cigarette. Briefly her fingers recall the texture of items in her purse as she used to shuffle them without looking, feeling for her lighter. Hypertension. A word her doctor says with a calm reproof, bony finger pointing shakily at her torso. May has, he says, folding the finger back into his palm, the barrel shape that overloads the heart. He has barred her from rummaging for the lighter. May is not really sentimental about smoking, nor does she feel any bitterness, like that of the woman who wrote a letter to the editor saying that in the long run Kents had meant more to her than either of her husbands. But May considers that she has been diminished, lost a careless power she had, to incorporate fire.
With the cigarettes went her perfect hearing. Now she hears a noise like a soft gong shadowing her speech. A definite echo, something to do with the cochlea, according to Dr. Jenkins. Drinking her coffee she decides to consider squarely whether her mind is as sound as ever, but she can think of no test to give herself, nothing that could stand for the whole of her mind and be measured, no giveaway sign like the one Patricia at work spied in her earlobe.
She has on large earrings, moons of stamped silver from Mexico, given to her by Patricia, who at fifty is the oldest in the office other than herself. “This will diversify her look,” Patricia told them all, snapping the earrings onto May’s ears. “Lucky for you they had clip-ons in Taxco.” Patricia treats her like a plain daughter who needs to be brought out. “See this? This crease?” Patricia said, pulling off the earring and doubling May’s long, passive earlobe in her fingers. “Heart. I read about it, the crease in the earlobe. You show that to your doctor. They never notice.”
“I will,” May said obediently.
Usually she wears pants but today she has on a belted dress with a jacket. The dress is a chic olive green, one of the best things in her closet now, saved for occasions that rarely arise. Despite her large waistline, she has worn the belt. Normally she would leave it off, having cut the belt loops from her few dresses. But in a fever of vitality last night she sat under the lamp with needle and thread, piecing a section of elastic into the belt that came with the dress and covering it with material out of the hem. She could not remember, this morning, why this had seemed such an exhilarating and fateful action.
Things like this, done increasingly in the evenings when she can’t be still, are part of the condition she is in. She has analyzed it, and found it tied to a subject much dwelt on when she taught, because of her students’ confusion over transitive and intransitive. “Whatever your dictionary or any dictionary of the future may say, in my class you cannot enjoy, you cannot await. You have to await something.” Now, she thinks, her own emotions take that prohibited form. They await. No object. Verb limited to the agent.
She pictures her feelings as a kind of mold. Spores, wafted from somewhere else, that come to rest in her, followed by blue splotches of mold, which begin to pool and billow. So—the furious sympathies, the weeklong fits of sleepless excitement she is prey to: mold. Perhaps she is downy and blue inside, stirring waywardly, like the child’s hair under the skylight.
At seventy-four, she is in love. Or not love. What is it? A consuming interest in another person—a person of not much interest, really, she thinks in bewilderment—has seized her, so that she looks forward to even the mildest encounters at work.
She has had crushes before. They blew away in the telling, when her older daughter Laura was still nearby to hear about them, but Laura is gone; her own children have grown up and she has gone with her husband Will to live abroad. May has had a year or so to get used to that. Of the long days of packing up Laura’s household she remembers only her son-in-law’s voice, loud in the empty rooms. She keeps the name of the country where they live out of her conversation at work, because with it comes a gust of cold air left in their wake—though the country is warm.
She doesn’t cry about Laura’s move. Her feeling about it is quite a disciplined, still one, without any of the radiating, the sinuous groping, of the feelings that make up the blue mold.
Every so often at work one of the women—actually girls, several of them are still girls—will cry. It is one of the privileges of youth to cry in the ladies’ room, and to be gradually coaxed out and made to say what is the matter, and to give pleasure by doing so. May remembers doing it herself, in the jobs she had during college and even in the hectic first years she taught school. At a later time, tears were to be hidden at all costs.
The sweet Jackie, the one who occupies her thoughts, is the youngest person in the office, and gives the most pleasure, with her clumsy, passionate sorrows, the elementary nature of her problems with men, which they are all eager to solve for her, and her bad luck. Jackie has the worst luck of any of them. She is looking for a good, kind man—that’s all she asks—and she meets lightweights and playboys and perverts. Already, at the age of twenty-four, she has lost her two children in a custody suit. As nearly as anybody in the office can figure out, she lost them because she had them in day care, while in court her ex-husband showed the intention of hiring someone to live in to take care of them. Actually Jackie has her children most of the time, or the day care does, because her husband didn’t really mean he wanted them. He meant something else. It turned out he was almost as young, confused, and clumsy as Jackie. He never hired anybody to live in, he bypassed the judge’s decision and one day just gave the children back to Jackie. Still, he reserved the right to put them out of her reach if he chose.
Both children turned a grayish brown during the month he had them with him in L.A. When Jackie covered them with kisses at the airport they were grimy, salty from seawater. Their tanned skin gave off a smell. Jackie herself is clean with the cleanliness seen and felt, May thinks, only in offices like this, where there is something devotional in the women’s preparations for work. “I didn’t know children had a smell,” Jackie said. “I don’t think he gave them baths. I’m wondering if he knows they have to have baths,” she said in her slow voice, remarkable for its lack of impatience. There is a melody to Jackie’s speech that makes May think of Marilyn Monroe’s voice of benign, very nearly pathetic, loveliness. Sometimes she wonders just where, in the eleventh-grade class she taught all those years, Jackie would have appeared in the percentiles. Can she be as ignorant as she seems?
But there is her beauty. Wherever Jackie goes, in her car, on the street, in stores, she is pointed out. In the big building their floor is known as the one where Jackie gets off the elevator. Her beauty is a pollen shaken onto all of them. She could be looking out over ruins, over oceans, a stone woman holding up a roof. She comes to life, moves along the line of cubicles to the ladies’ room, stopping to speak to everybody, gracious, thinks May, as the Virgin. Though not so graceful. Jackie carries herself with a guarded slowness, but she is large-boned and awkward; she scatters paper and she tips over desk vases and coffee cups. May waits to be the one to excuse her.
Jackie is not only beautiful, she is generous. She comes to May’s desk, lays a huge tissue-wrapped package on the computer monitor, and May tears off the tissue to find an afghan crocheted in turquoise, yellow, and mauve. “I just did it watching TV, it’s nothing,” Jackie says softly. “Now, May, I want you to wrap up in this on a rainy night. I know your place is cold.” How does she know this, without having been there? Her voice is pitched low, as if to soothe a cat.
At Christmas, dusting powder and lavender soap for May, each cake in thin silver paper tied with purple ribbon. For her birthday, a quilted tea cozy.
It doesn’t bother May that Jackie has made or chosen presents with the sort of hopeful, unspecific appropriateness—which is at the same time the hopeless, smiling, defeated inappropriateness—
of tributes you might take with you to give your hosts in a foreign country.
Jackie has a ripe mouth and a beautiful nose, slightly puffy at the base as if from crying. She wears her golden-brown hair unfashionably long, sometimes in a loose braid. “I gave up,” she will say. “All morning I tried to get this into a French braid. It makes your arms ache. How do they do those things?” The remarkable thing is that despite her looks, all the women like her; they buy her little cards to stick up around her desk that say things like “Yes, it’s still my break,” and memo pads printed “To Whom It May Confuse.” Jackie smiles at these offerings, but the fact is she has no humor. After six months of watching and listening, May is reasonably sure of this. To Jackie, everything is absolutely serious.
May has come under the spell of this seriousness.
What does it matter if you are stupid, she finds herself thinking, if you are beautiful and sad? If you have this sobriety about life, if you are absorbent of it, as Jackie is, if you read the newspaper every day at your desk as if it were a letter you had to answer. May has the example of her own mother, who did answer, who wrote tirelessly to editors, and tried, more fiercely than Jackie ever could, certainly, to sway any mind confused by the indifferent or the heartless: the Hoover administration, or strikebreakers, or the common opinion.
But in Jackie’s case, all that is not sad confusion is secret pattern. She always reports several items at lunch: murders, implausible accidents, crimes against children, the coincidences that determine who boards doomed planes. Or she recounts stories from a book she has been reading for weeks, about near-death experiences. Unaware of May’s attention, she looks out the window, her nose swollen, her dark blue eyes faraway as she describes men, women, and children from the near-death book who tore themselves out of the grasp of hands reaching from the other side, or were let go more gently because there was something left for them to accomplish.
At first, when May was new to the office, she grinned to herself whenever Jackie talked. She thought not just of her mother, who would have laughed with disbelief at the idea of a woman like Jackie who did nothing with her sympathies. She thought of her husband Cole, dead for years: how he would have enjoyed stories of Jackie. He would not have seen exactly what May meant, never having been susceptible, as May was, to the allure of an indefinable humility or an unlikely goodness or an unfocused, caressing gaze. But he would have liked the office stories; he would have been someone to whom she could tell them, with both daughters gone. Or would he? What if he could have come up, just once, in the elevator with May to this hidden office of women, where she did work of no importance in a program he and she would have laughed at together? Would he have said, May, for God’s sake, what are you doing here? No, she liked to think he would have said, I see. And then, That must be Jackie. There, the beautiful one. But there was no way to be sure.
Then, over a month or two, May lost altitude. A series of slow drops followed, as in dreams when four or five stairs are missing as you go down. She began to note the times of Jackie’s trips to the ladies’ room. Jackie had to pass her desk to get there and liked to stop and pick up the framed photographs of May’s daughters, Laura on her veranda across the world, her face in the shadow of a palm leaf, Vera in fatigues and a lab coat, giving a shot to a thin man or woman—impossible to tell—draped in a Red Cross blanket.
The women have all heard stories of Vera and Laura, who have passed a kind of test in the office. Good daughters, both of them, however far away for the time being. The women have ascertained that letters come, and phone calls, from both girls, who are not girls by any means, but hardworking women in their forties. Vera calls from wherever she is without checking the time; she knows May welcomes a ringing phone at any hour of the night. She likes to settle in and talk to May, and seems not to care about who at her end will pay the bill. Often it seems to be a man, in some hotel where she has landed on leave for a day or two.
They know Laura is the tenderhearted one who writes books and, married to a doctor, can pay for her calls to her mother herself; Vera is the adventurer who could never get down on paper all she has to say about the night convoys and starved refugees, the filthy camps toured by diplomats, the exhausted teammates and talkative driver/spies and comrades and lovers who fill her days.
None of the women in the office, including May, would hesitate to ask questions or offer opinions—if not approving, at least deferring judgment—on the subject of each other’s families. They know all about cruel in-laws and saintly ones, and spiteful siblings and no-contact orders and men who have to be forgiven. May has let the talk carry her away a few times. With their enthusiastic approval she has made reference to events in her own life. When she volunteered that she had had a lover but her husband never had, they weren’t surprised at her but they didn’t believe the part about her husband. When she said her friend Leah’s divorce in the late fifties was the first divorce she had ever heard of other than among movie stars, they couldn’t believe that either.
Most of them are young enough to have something to say about problem parents, and to have respectfully noted that May’s, gone of course, were from a time when those raising families had fewer distractions and did a better job of it. “Another era,” they said. “Simpler.” May has countered with the information that things were not that simple; for one thing, a great number of people died young; her own mother did—something, they agreed, sadly characteristic of those days.
They know May had a son, as well as daughters. There is a small picture of him, too, in a silver frame on her desk, which they don’t pick up and look at. They know she could not make a story of him. She always has a feeling Jackie is on the verge of picking the picture up, though; her hand seems to hover over it, almost in blessing.
Jackie likes to ask May questions about her daughters, or come around behind her—“Look at you!”—to tuck the label back under her collar, where the skin will go on ringing as if the pedal has been put down on a note.
In time, May began to keep a chair beside her for Jackie in the lunchroom, and liked to be the one to lend her money when they all ate out. Finally she fell under the compulsion of waiting for Jackie in the morning when she came in late, in a dew of apologies, shaking the static out of her pant legs, trailing her sadness, like Persephone let out of the depths.
“Heavens! Was that man there when you came in, in the garage, exposing himself?” says Persephone. Catcalls from the rest of the women. “You guys. Seriously, there ought to be some way he can get help. Well? Obviously he’s in need.”
The day of the flasher, May, like a real, established lover, was listening to a small unloving mockery of Jackie in her mind. This gave her some relief. But suddenly the doorway where Jackie was standing went dark as a negative. It grew veins like the sheen in coal. Her amusement was cut off by the fear, for the first time, that she really was having a stroke: fading room, vertigo, angel advancing to take her through that tunnel described in the near-death book.
If so it wa. . .
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