While it’s true that Norma thinks a lot about who she is, it isn’t true that she puts herself before others. Always chiming through her head are Jimmy’s commandments to be kind. She never worried much about hurting her friends before, but she worries now. In spite of which she occasionally gives them the slip and walks down the corridors by herself, looking at pretty girls. She feels humbly entitled. She feels that God might grant
her, who is not beautiful but who is moved by beauty, at least the pleasure of looking.
But it would never occur to her to change herself to attract pretty girls. Her weight loss is entirely for her brother, to house his spirit, and her longer hair is for their father. The fact that she is becoming more attractive to the rest of the world is so incidental that she doesn’t realize it. Nobody tells her.
Although their father doesn’t mention her hair again, she feels that he is well pleased with her for how she slaps tools in his palm like an operating-room nurse and for being a good listener. As they work, he tells stories about when he was a boy nicknamed Jumbo on account of his big ears, which Grandma Field boxed at least once a day for good measure. He says that just like Sandy he used to like resting his ear on an empty dinner plate. As they work, he is full of these surprising facts.
Away from the rec room, however, around the rest of the family, he is still gloomy and quiet. He forgets to buy a Christmas tree, and finally, on December twenty-fourth, Lou arrives home with a bent, pathetic little spruce that she dug up from someone’s lawn.
“If we’re lucky,” she says,“he’ll forget to buy us gifts too.”
He doesn’t. He gets them all out-of-style green-and-blue-plaid parkas, and for Lou and Sandy he also gets out-of-style patterned knee-socks.
Norma’s second gift is a red angora sweater.
“Gee, that’s not bad,” Sandy says in an amazed, envious voice.
“Try it on,” their father suggests, spreading his arms across the back of the chesterfield.
It’s too small. Norma knew it would be as soon as she saw it, but she goes into her bedroom and puts it on anyway. She can hardly glance at herself in the mirror. Big, disgusting. Screaming red. She tears the sweater off.
Why red? She never wears bright colours. And she never wears anything tight, he must notice that. She stands there
pulling the sweater in and out like an accordion. She wants to cry, thinking of him buying it especially for her. Why didn’t he buy her a hammer?
“How’s it look?” he calls.
“Great.”
“C’mon out. Let’s see.”
“Okay, just a minute.” She puts the sweater back on and walks down the hall feeling as she does at school—that her breasts are hideous and offensive but the shield of her soul.
“Holy shit,” Lou says.
Norma looks at their father. “It’s really nice,” she murmurs.
“Well,” he says, nodding. “It seems to fit all right.”
His eyes are flitting all over her. She feels sorry for him. She feels that her embarrassment must be nothing compared to his.
Yet he wants her to wear the sweater. On Boxing Day he asks where it is.
“In my dresser,” she answers, bewildered. She can’t conceive that he’s asking why the sweater isn’t on her back. Actually, it’s in Sandy’s dresser. She’s given it to Sandy.
“What are you saving it for?” he asks. “Go put it on.”
“Now?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Aren’t we working on the rec room today?”
“A little sawdust never hurt anything.”
She figures that he can’t stand the idea of all the money he spent going to waste (Sandy thinks the sweater cost at least twenty dollars), that he can’t face the fact that he’s made an expensive mistake. If he’s prepared to accept her in the sweater, Norma knows she should be, too. But when she puts it on, she is unable to leave the bedroom. At last she pulls a cardigan on over top and leaves the buttons at the neck open to show the sweater’s turtleneck. He doesn’t say anything.
That day and during the rest of the Christmas holidays they
finish the bathroom. To make him happy, she wears the sweater under her work shirt or under the cardigan. On the last day (a precarious day, being the last, because when they complete any job he is liable to say,“This calls for a celebration,” and then down a six pack) he has a chest cold and turns the furnace way up, causing them both to perspire. He insists that she remove her shirt when she wipes her forehead on the tail of it.
“You don’t need all those layers,” he says.
Part of her feels released. He is telling her that he doesn’t care what she looks like. Oh, to be taken for granted! But she can’t take herself for granted, not in that sweater. She hunches and folds her arms.
When the last tile is down on the floor, sure enough he begins drinking. She stays with him like the angel on his shoulder, occupying herself by sitting at the little laundry table beside the fridge and taking all the screws out of the screw and nail box and sorting them. He watches her and drinks in silence.
In the middle of beer five he walks over to her. Bending forward, he reaches across in front of her, and his hand bumps against her breasts.
She stiffens. Their eyes meet, and she has the positive, unearthly feeling that he’s touched her on purpose.
“Sorry,” he mutters. What he’s reaching for is the hammer that’s lying beside the box on her far side. He gets the hammer and his beer, and dragging his bad leg, crosses to the end wall. After many attempts he yanks out a crooked nail in one of the beams.
“Jesus bids us shine with a pure, clear light,” Norma thinks frantically, as a kind of cleansing prayer. She is overcome with shame. Her filthy mind. Across the room, his back to her, their father runs his palm over the beam, his arm going in and out of a dusty, sallow wedge of sunlight.
What is God’s idea of pure clear? she wonders. How much contamination does he make allowances for?
Tuesday evenings at six-thirty and Sunday afternoons at one, Reg picks Sandy up at the bus stop. Luckily their father doesn’t pay attention to her comings and goings.
After sex, Reg lies back panting and says,“I’m a broken man.” Then he has a cigarette and talks about the shoe business or about the hell he went through when he was married to his first wife,“the dike.”
His second wife, the one he has now, is a great mother and a great party thrower, but he’s pretty sure she’s turning into a dike, too, because she’s gone off intercourse.
“She’s probably happy you’ve got a girlfriend,” Sandy volunteers.
“Are you out of your mind?” he says.
They always drive to the old motel strip on the two-lane highway going into the city. So as not to leave an obvious trail, they change motels each time, and about a block away from the one he’s decided on, Sandy gets out of the car to let him drive ahead and check in alone. The Mustang is usually the only car in the parking lot. How do these places stay in business? she wonders. Reg tries to get the highest-numbered room, but sometimes, who knows why, he can’t and has to whisper-yell at her from the door—opened a crack—as she walks past. It isn’t just his wife that worries him. It’s that Sandy is jailbait, and he wants to be able to claim, if he has to, that she propositioned him.
In the room there are a few lonely moments during which he paces in his overcoat and says that he has a feeling the desk clerk recognized him from the store, or that his wife knows something fishy is going on. Sandy wanders into the bathroom and turns on the light that is also a fan. The perfection of her face in the mirror comforts her. It gives her the composure to
sit like a lady on the edge of his bed until he stops pacing and sits beside her.
She does whatever he likes. She tries to anticipate it. Except to make him happy, she has no desires herself, but she’s good at guessing his. On their third date he is lying on his back after making love, and she kisses the line of black hair on his stomach all the way down to his penis, kisses the tip of his penis, and just knows that what he wants is for her to put the whole thing in her mouth.
“Oh, yeah, baby,” he says when she does.
He covers her ears with his hands and moves her head up and down. She thinks they’ve invented something. His ejaculation is like the dentist’s squirter except warmer and tasting of salt and Javex.
“You can swallow it,” he gasps.
She already has.
The day that he breaks off with her, she guesses he is going to the minute she climbs into the car. Something tells her, she couldn’t say what. Leaning against the passenger door, feeling nothing, she waits. Even when they drive to the motel strip and pull over onto the shoulder, as usual, she knows she isn’t supposed to hop out.
In silence they both watch the traffic. It seems a quarter of an hour passes before he speaks.
“My wife knows.”
“Oh.”
“She went nuts. Completely out of her mind. Crying, screaming …”
Sandy regards her white hands with the eyes of his wife, who she imagines has age spots and dishpan hands. A woman almost as old as their mother. Out of her mind. When their father made them pin their mother to the bed, their mother cried and screamed. In the hallway, Norma held on to her, strong as a man.
“But how did she find out?” Sandy asks.
“I told her.” He sighs. “She knew something was up. I said I had to see you one more time. To break it off. Christ Almighty—” he shakes his head, laughs bitterly. “She wanted to come along.” He runs his fingers over the top of his head, as if he still has hair. Sandy thinks he looks really old. She can’t imagine having kissed him, let alone the rest. She closes her eyes.
“Ah, baby,” he says. “Ah, baby doll, I’m sorry.” His hand drops on her thigh. “I was going to tell you after we boogie-woogied.” She opens her eyes. He is smiling sappily at her. “God, you know, you could wear me down yet. Right here. This minute. One last time.” He strokes her leg and brings his mouth to her ear. “Say the word,” he whispers. “I’m a weak man.”
A bus is coming down the road. If she runs, she can catch it. She picks up her purse, opens the door and gets out.
“I’ll drive you,” he shouts, his voice falling away.
On Tuesday evening she happens to glance at the kitchen clock at exactly six-thirty—the time she usually meets him—and her heart starts hammering, then seems to stop dead. She places her hand over it and can’t feel a beat. It reminds her of trying to feel the heartbeat of the Santa Claus man, and it occurs to her that maybe he wasn’t dead after all. That seems like a dream, that day. Nothing has ever felt so lovely as when she had her feet in his lap and he stroked them with a blade of grass.
The next morning as she stands in her slip surveying the contents of her closet, she thinks, What does it matter what I wear? Since meeting Reg, she has stopped dating boys from school. Their soft hands and pink lips disgust her. They are just tall six-year-olds, unsophisticated, loud-mouthed. If one of them goes to bed with a girl, the whole school knows about it.
“Oh, Reg,” she sighs, pulling down any old dress from its hanger. But she doesn’t cry.
It takes about a week for her to realize that whenever she thinks of something specific about Reg, apart from his laugh and their lovemaking, for instance if she thinks of his bald spot or the clumps of black hair on his back or him singing Frank Sinatra songs, she is relieved that she won’t be seeing him again. There’s a hole in her life, but it’s a hole that can be filled by another nice, well-dressed gentleman. Such as Bob, the Englishman who drives a Mercedes and picked her up at the bus stop a couple of weeks ago and took her all the way to work.
“I’m dating someone,” she told him.
“Here’s my card,” he said.
The card is pale blue with silver lettering: Robert Featherstone, President, Featherstone and Ridley Corp. Two weeks after she and Reg break up, she calls him from a phone booth, and they make a date for the next evening.
He takes her to his office on the seventeenth floor of a new bank building downtown. “Let’s just say I play Monopoly for real,” he says when she asks him what he does. On a white wall-to-wall shag carpet they make love in their clothes, him still in his coat, getting inside her by tugging her underpants out of the way. Before they leave his office, he writes her initials beside seven o’clock on Thursday in his appointment book.
Since she works Thursday nights, she has to phone in sick, something she’s never done before. “It’s that goddamn Asiatic flu,” Mrs. Dart says sympathetically. She prescribes hot toddies.
Bob picks Sandy up at the same bus stop where she used to wait for Reg. As soon as she gets in his car, he slips his hand up to her underpants and hooks a finger around the crotch.
“I’ve got to pop in at the office,” he says in his voice like Rex Harrison’s.
His finger stays hooked. She can’t shift position or think of anything to say. “I’ve caught a little fish,” he says at a stoplight. All the way downtown he holds on. Even when they park, he doesn’t let go immediately, and she has a few seconds of terror
that he’s a pervert, that he’s going to try to pull her by her underpants out of the car and down the street.
But of course he doesn’t. When he releases her, she feels stupid for having thought something so crazy about the president of a company.
At his office she walks in ahead of him over to his desk. He shuts and locks the door, and the next thing she knows, he lifts her skirt up and presses himself into her rear end. He already has an erection.
They make love standing there. He grasps her by the waist, and she rests her forearms on his green leather desk pad. There’s a handwritten airmail letter at right angles to her line of vision. “Dear Bobbo,” she reads before he covers the rest with his hand.
“Use this,” he says when she reaches for a piece of foolscap to catch the semen dripping out of her. He tosses a clean white linen handkerchief on the desk.
“Are you sure?” she asks, thinking of his wife on laundry day.
“I have a bit of work to do,” he says.
“That’s okay. I’ll wait out at the reception.” Holding the handkerchief between her legs, she turns to face him.
His hands are praying under his chin. “No,” he says slowly. “No. You see, I shall be an hour at least.”