Eileen (14 page)

But then I saw it—the notebook. Rebecca had left it on the ledge of the window behind the table. And so when the last
visitor left, I snatched it and walked down through the corridors toward Rebecca's office, quite pleased that I'd found such a good excuse to poke my nose in. I hoped that Lee was still in there with her and I could catch the two of them red-handed. I don't know what I was expecting to find, but I put my ear to the door, straining to hear sighs and moans, or whatever people sounded like when they made love. I'd never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons. I heard, felt nothing. I knocked on Rebecca's office door.

“Oh, Eileen,” she chirped when she opened it. “Are you all right?”

I took a step back, feeling like a child, a nuisance. I extended the notebook toward her. She took it, thanked me, said she hoped I hadn't read it.

“Of course I didn't,” I told her. I couldn't have, anyway—that chicken scratch was indecipherable.

“I'm only teasing,” she laughed. “My book of secrets.” She clutched the notebook to her chest. She had a way of laughing, head thrown back, jaw cut so smooth and white and hard, as if it were rimmed in porcelain, eyes first pinched in ecstasy, then wide and wild—devilish eyes, beautiful eyes—then face lowered, beaming with affection or derision, I couldn't tell. I turned to leave, but she stopped me by laying a hand on my shoulder. This sent chills down my spine. Nobody had touched me like that in years. I forgave her instantly for betraying me with the boy. I could hear him inside clearing his throat.

“Say,” she began. “Would you be up for a drink after work
tonight? I don't know anyone in this darn town, and I would love to treat you to a cocktail, if you're game.”

The way she talked was so canned, so scripted, it inspired me to be just as canned. “Say.” People didn't really talk like that. “A cocktail.” If she seems insincere, she was. She was terribly pretentious, and later, in hindsight, I felt she'd insulted my intelligence by selling me her scripted bunk. “Darn it all.” But at the time I felt I was being invited into an elite world of beautiful people. I was flattered. And I was flustered. I had never received such an invitation in my life, so this was as thrilling and terrifying as hearing someone tell me, “I love you.” I was full of gratitude. I didn't think of my father, my evening duties, any of that. I just said, “OK.”

“OK? I've twisted your arm?” Rebecca joked. She let the door swing open a bit. I could see Lee Polk sitting in a chair in front of her desk, looking through a large book of pictures. When he saw me he held the book up to hide his face.

“Sure,” I said. “How about O'Hara's around seven?” I was shocked by how easily the words came out of my mouth. I hoped my death mask had not betrayed me, prayed I sounded cool. O'Hara's was just a dark dive with hard wooden booths, a place working-class locals went. The usual clientele were cops and firefighters and men from the shipyard who stank powerfully of sweat and salt. Two single women alone at a place like O'Hara's would inspire strange looks, or worse. But I was game. I was a peon and I was a child, but I was not a coward. “It's the only bar in town,” I added.

“Sounds perfect,” Rebecca whispered. She made a playful,
conniving face. “I'll see you there. With bells on! Is that the expression?” She shut the door.

So that was something. You have to remember I was what you'd call a loser, a square, a ding-a-ling. I was a wet blanket. I had never gone out at night. Even in college, the dances were chaperoned, and among the girls in my dorm was the sense that to stray from the flock meant you were a floozy, a prostitute, a sinner, greedy, disgraceful, a threat to civilization, bad. Setting foot in a place like O'Hara's would have been frowned upon. But if Rebecca was doing it, I would do it, too. What did I have to lose? I left work early to give myself time to go home and change. I figured I had to put on a dress, do my makeup, find my mother's perfume. Getting dolled up was completely silly, of course. You can always tell something when a woman is overdressed—either she's an outsider, or she's insane.

I wasn't a stranger at O'Hara's. Sandy, the bartender, was a thick and slow-moving man with deep acne scars and a gold cross, a flirt. I'd been there plenty of times, first as a young girl sent in to fetch my father from an extended after-work beer with his fellow cops while my mother waited in the car, and later as a sober escort when he'd get drunk and refuse to accept a ride home. I remember one autumn evening in particular when I was home from college for the weekend, my mother sent me to the bar to pick up my dad. Driving home along the moonlit streets, he laid his head on my shoulder, told me I was a good girl, that he loved me, that he was sorry he couldn't be better, that he knew I deserved a real father. It moved me at first, but then his hand went to my breast. I beat him off easily. “Quit
fussing, Joanie,” he said, slumping back in his seat. I never mentioned it to anyone.

Before I left Moorehead that day, I finished the vermouth in my locker, and then I drove to the liquor store for more gin and beer for my father and another bottle of vermouth for me. I'd need a drink before meeting Rebecca at O'Hara's, I was that nervous. At home, I set the bag of booze down next to my father, who was sleeping in his recliner with his face smushed against the cushion, eyebrows raised, forehead clenched, body twisted and clunky under the flannel robe. I ran up into the shower as silently as I could. Let me be clear about this: I was not a lesbian. But I was attracted to Rebecca, yearned for her attention and approval, and I admired her. You could call it a crush. Rebecca might as well have been Marlon Brando, James Dean. Elvis. Marilyn Monroe. In such company, any normal person would want to look right, smell good. I worried what might happen if Rebecca wanted to lean in close to me the way she did with Lee. What if she could smell that I was menstruating, and that I hadn't washed? What if she smelled it clear as day but didn't say anything? How, then, would I know whether or not she'd smelled it, and how ought I act to pretend I didn't know Rebecca smelled it? My poor nether regions. My body's readiness to bear a child seemed classless and vulgar to me, and I felt that if Rebecca had any idea that I was menstruating, I would be humiliated. I would die. These were my thoughts as I scrubbed.

Once I got out of the shower, I put my hair up in a towel and listened for the sound of my father fussing downstairs, hoping
I could sneak out without having to talk to him. The prettiest song I'd ever heard was the silence of the house that night, just the pipes gently clanging, the wind howling outside. I dressed per usual from my mother's closet, choosing what I thought would look nice—a black wool dress with a high neck, a golden broach of leaves in a circle. I brushed my hair, which was still wet, put on my new shade of lipstick, pulled on a fresh pair of stolen stockings, then stood perplexed at my mother's closet full of shoes, which were all one-half size too big. I didn't own any shoes besides my beat-up loafers and my snow boots, so I wore the snow boots. They made me feel oafish and silly, but it was winter, after all. I chose a black cape from my mother's collection of winter coats, grabbed my purse, shut the door softly, and ran out to the car. It was so cold that by the time I was out of the driveway, my hair had frozen in strips. They rattled like dead insects by my ears while I drove with the windows up, holding my breath. I parked under a broken streetlamp across from O'Hara's, reapplied my lipstick in the rearview mirror and skidded over the ice to the bar.

When I opened the door to the dark, warm din, there was Rebecca, legs crossed high on a bar stool, facing a booth full of scruffy young men. They all seemed to be sweating a little, smiling, nervous as kittens and swirling their beers. Each wore the customary heavy wool jacket in blue, gray, or red plaid, and a hat—either a tight-fitting knit cap or the kind with the flaps that come down over the ears—and their faces were red and chapped from windburn and sunburn and cold. The four of them listened as Rebecca went on about something I couldn't hear.

“Oh, Eileen!” she exclaimed, interrupting herself. Her voice sang through the smoke and Christmas carols playing on the jukebox—Perry Como or Frank Sinatra, I couldn't tell the difference. The booth of men fell still, all eyes on Rebecca and none on me as I walked toward her. Nevertheless, I felt important, like a celebrity, even. Rebecca swirled around on her bar stool, ignoring her audience of admirers, and waved to me as though we were good friends coming together again after a dramatic period of separation, as though she were leaning over the rail of some romantic ocean liner, me a sight for sore eyes, so much to talk about. She was drinking a martini, and I studied the way she held the glass, which fingers she used, pointer and pinky raised in the air like at an elegant soiree. She was utterly out of place at O'Hara's. She wore her same outfit from work, but she had tied her hair back into a braid. Her coat lay across the seat of the stool next to her. As I approached her, she turned and pulled the coat off and added it to the pile of fur hat and leather gloves on the seat to her left. “I was saving both these seats,” she said, “in case someone tried to sit down, know what I mean? Well, have a seat. What'll you have?”

“I'll have a beer, I guess,” I said.

“A beer, how neat,” said Rebecca. This was quaint to her, this beer. It was clear that she was from what you'd call an affluent family, so affluent that she seemed to care not at all what anybody made of her. She was motivated by something other than money—personal values, I suppose. But while she had the unmistakable ease and refinement of someone from the upper class, or at least a good deal higher in class than me and the fine
patrons of O'Hara's, there was also something earthy about her. Her hair, especially in its red color, its roughness, its wild beauty, kept her from seeming like a snob. Sandy walked toward us, drying his hands with a rag. He slapped it over his shoulder, put his elbow down on the bar, and leaned in toward Rebecca.

“So what's next, sweetheart?” he said, ignoring me. Rebecca barely looked at him. To my surprise, she put her hand over mine. Hers was hot and light.

“Oh, my stars, you're absolutely frozen,” she said. “And your hair is wet.” She turned to Sandy. “One beer, please, and maybe also a little whiskey to warm up my girl. What say, huh?” She looked at me and smiled. “I'm so glad you made it out.” She gave my hand a squeeze and leaned back as though to survey me, a funny look on her face. As I unwrapped my cape, she said something like, “Oh my, you look very glamorous.”

I blushed. I was not glamorous. She was being kind, and that embarrassed me. I drank my whiskey. “I thought I'd have a hard time finding the place, but here it is,” she sang, pointing out the stuffed hammerhead on the wall. “Isn't it funny? It's sort of sad, actually. Well, not so sad.” She was babbling. The men kept standing up and leaning on the bar next to her, but she didn't seem to notice them. Somebody played “Mr. Lonely” on the jukebox, the Bobby Vinton song. I always hated that song. I drank my beer in small quick sips as Rebecca complained about the cold, the icy roads, the New England winters. I was grateful just to sit there and be with her and listen to her talk.

After a minute or two, her eyes darted around my face. “You feel all right?”

“Oh yeah, I'm fine,” I said. Rebecca looked at me expectantly, so I thought of anything I could tell her. “There's something wrong with my car,” is all I came up with in the moment. “So I have to drive with the windows down or else it fills with smoke.”

“That sounds positively awful. Have another whiskey. I insist.” She motioned to Sandy, gestured at our empty glasses. “Can't your husband get that fixed for you?”

“Oh, I'm not married,” I told her, embarrassed that Sandy could hear me. But of course I wasn't married. She was teasing me.

“I don't want to assume. Some people are funny about bachelorettes.” She spoke carefully. “Personally, I don't see what the big deal is. I'm single myself.” She tickled the stem of her glass with her nails. “I'm just not interested in marriage.”

“Don't tell that to those guys,” I said, impressed by my own wit. I'd been keeping an eye on the men in the booth as they mumbled secretively to one another, seeming to be weighing their options, planning something. They all looked familiar—they could have been friends of Joanie's—but I didn't know their names.

“You're funny, you know that?” Rebecca went on. “I've always been single. And when I have a guy around me, it's just for fun, and it's brief. I don't stay long anywhere, with anything. It's sort of my modus vivendi, or my pathology—depending on who I'm talking to.” She paused, looked at me. “Who
am
I talking to? Who am I babbling at?” she widened her eyes comically.

“Eileen,” I answered innocently, then blushed as I realized she'd only been making a joke of my reticence.

I was glad Rebecca wasn't married or just out to find a husband. That's what girls did back then—hunted for husbands. I wonder if she ever did get married. I like imagining her with a short, nebbish sort of husband—a Jew most likely—because I think that's what she'd need, someone intelligent and serious and neurotic, unimpressed by her gregariousness and sparkling repartee. Someone controlling. Sandy set new drinks down in front of me.

“This is all on my tab,” Rebecca said, circling her finger at my glasses.

“It's on theirs,” said Sandy, nodding toward the table of men.

“Oh, God, no,” said Rebecca. “That won't do. Here, as a retainer.” She slid a twenty-dollar bill across the counter. Sandy let it sit there and made her another martini, probably the second martini he'd made in his life. I remember these scenes very clearly, and I recount them because I think it says something of how Rebecca appealed to me as a young woman, how she managed to gain my trust. First she solicited my envy, then she worked to extinguish it. By completely dismissing the men at the bar, and then men in general, she put to rest my earlier suspicions about her relationship with Lee Polk, and tempered my fear that she might steal Randy away from me. She sipped her drink, poked at the twenty-dollar bill she'd put down on the bar. “Men and their money.” She knew just what to say. “But enough about me,” she said. “Tell me about you. How long have you worked at Moorehead?”