Girls In 3-B, The (14 page)

"How's your proof coming?"

"I keep thinking maybe the author is right and I'm wrong."

"That's the wrong approach. If you start feeling reverent, it's too bad."

"It's these modern ones. They don't bother with sentences."

"Sure. They use words the way the painters use color
--
to express the way they feel. Some of them must feel like hell." Phyllis decided that the tiny squizzle at the end of the line was meant for a period, and circled it. "Keep your pencil sharp. You can't edit with a dull pencil."

"Double entendre?"

"Could be, if you were a fellow."

That tough practical approach was a good one to have, Pat decided, but how did you go about getting it
?
Here she was all tied up in hard knots over a man who didn't even know she was alive. Here was Barby going around all moody, refusing to go on dates in spite of the fact that she looked like a movie star and walked like a prima ballerina
--
a waste of sex appeal. Here was Annice
--
she had felt responsible for Annice since the first day of freshman year, when the school bus let her off at the corner by the consolidated high school, a small red-headed girl of thirteen with big scared eyes. Annice had an odd, intense look now, and half the time she didn't bother to go to her classes. She hadn't exactly dropped out of school, just didn't go or o her assignments. She wouldn't go out any more with Jackson Carter, who was the kind of fellow other girls drooled over; she spent half her time in Alan's apartment, and Pat tried not to think what she might be doing there. It was evident that most of the problems and woes of the female sex grew out of their preoccupation with men, and no salary check or nameplate on a desk was going to induce that kind of response in anyone under the age of eighty.

Blake Thomson's buzzer sounded. Two shots
--
dictation. She put a shaking hand to her chignon, which slipped in moments of stress no matter how well she anchored it, straightened her stocking seams, pulled her skirt around before she reached for her notebook and pencil and went in.

“I don't want to."

"Sure you do. You always want to, because you have perfect responses. Look who developed them," Alan said, grinning. In the greenish shadow from the window shade his skin looked white and thin; his half-closed eyes and small beard gave him the look of a satyr. He lay back naked against the sheets, relaxed and ready for argument. She marveled, knowing that a touch or a whispered word would trigger him into readiness for love.

"Well, all right then, I do want to. But I'm not going to because it isn't safe.”

“That's a poor excuse."

"No, it isn't. I read it in a book," Annice said hotly. "It said this is the worst time, middle of the month this way. that's when anything can happen.”

"Where did you find this book
?
"

"In a drugstore." She forestalled his answer. "But anyway it's so."

Alan rolled over on his side and groped around on the floor for cigarettes. "Come on, get your clothes off."

"Well, all right." But she sat with her arms crossed on her chest, looking a him, begging for understanding. "It isn't because I don't want to. I do want to, practically all the time. Only I'm scared."

"That's unworthy."

"What if I had a baby?"

"Why not? It would get along all right. Do you good to have a baby, fill you out, make a woman out of you. A girl isn't complete until she has some kids." He considered. "One kid, anyhow."

"Without being married
?
My mother would die."

"That idea's a holdover from chattel slavery. They used to put an iron ring on a woman's ankle to show she belonged to some man. Now they put a gold ring on her finger. As far as your mother is concerned," Alan said, "why should you care what she thinks
?
She's lived her life
--
you live yours."

Annice shivered. It was cold in his room; it was always cold, because the rent was so low, and she hated the untidiness. Bourgeois or not, she couldn't shake off her early training. "I have as much right to like things neat as you have to like them messy," she said, and he raised his eyebrows in surprise. "Now how did you get off on that?"

"Oh
--
I don't know."

"Do you know a better place
?
"

She didn't. They were safe from interruptions here; the other tenants
--
raffish young men in their twenties, dressed like Alan and, like him, apparently without human ties or obligations
--
might leer at her when they came in together, but they accepted her as Alan's girl and didn't ask any questions. She had talked for twenty minutes one evening with that Jenni who was trying to kill Madame's violets, but she still didn't know his last name, and she was sure he didn't care about hers. There was a degree of security in this amoral indifference.

"Anyway, if you won't use a
--
a thing, I don't see why you won't let me go to a doctor and get fitted with a diaphragm." Her voice wobbled; she knew she was right, but that didn't make any difference. He chuckled. Nothing amused him more than her avoidance of words he used casually. She suspected that he worked them into the conversation just to see her wince. He said, patiently, "It's not right. I don't mean middle-class morality, I mean belng natural. Uninhibited. Living life fully. Beating around the bush all the time and saying no to life
--
that's the only sin."

"It's a sin to bring an unwanted child into the world.”

"Well, then, you could have an operation. Mind, I don't approve of that either, but a girl has to make up her own mind about these things."

"Don't you think the father has anything to do with it?”

"Hell no, why should he? Fatherhood is an accident. Maybe when I'm forty or fifty I’ll be ready to beget a child," Alan said grandly. "Or maybe not. The children of superior people are likely to be quite mediocre, you know."

She considered. She did want him very badly. They had been going to bed together for three weeks, almost every day. Not quite every day. She never knew whether he would call up or not, and she guessed that he would be angry if she came to his place unasked, since freedom meant so much to him. That didn't matter. What mattered was that since the first time they had been together, on the davenport in her apartment, she had been learning about love. There was this hunger you learned to feel; and then there was the satisfaction that was like nothing else on earth. Thinking about it filled her with desire for his body, he shut her eyes. "Oh, Alan, it isn't that I don't want to."

"Peel off, then."

She unbuttoned her blouse, conscious of his eyes on her and, as always, half proud because her body was young and slender and lovely, and half abashed because she wasn't as voluptuous as the girls he looked after on the street. Her breasts, free from the narrow strip of nylon and latex padding, were small and proud, and she had the concave front and flat hips of a very young girl. She stepped out of her skirt and knee-length stockings and stood naked beside the bed, hesitating. "I don't suppose you'd marry me if I got caught?"

"God no. Do I look feeble-minded or something?"

"Plenty of people do."

"Marriage is for the birds. Don't let's waste time arguing, baby. We've got better things to do." He took her hand. "Feel that. All for you."

"I'm scared."

"Sissy."

"You never think about anybody but yourself."

"Of course not. You never think about anybody but
yourself
, either. Nobody does." He hugged her close. "This is going to be a hell of a lot of fun, with you all tied up in hard knots. Relax."

"You don't love me."

"Sure I do. Don't I take my time and make you feel wonderful
?
Don't I
?
How can you say I don't love you
?
" His hand traveled down her arm and came to rest on her breast. "Stop thinking. Just feel."

She sighed. He had put her in the wrong again. She was mean, selfish and narrow-minded. She never had an answer; she was always wrong, and he was always right. She said, "Well
--
"

"You don't have to, you know." He rolled over, presenting an impersonal stretch of back. "I can always go out and get something else."

"I'll never speak to you again if you do."

"You won't know anything about it."

"I'd know."

"You wouldn't. And it wouldn't matter. I believe in freedom." He caught her as she moved closer, and lay against her. Desire rose in her, a mounting tide. She cupped her hands over his buttocks. "Turn over," she whispered. "Please."

"I don't care how many guys you lay. You're a free woman."

"I don't want anybody but you."

"Want me?"

"Yes. Oh, yes, I have to."

She turned under him, feeling her whole being rush to meet his passion. She would worry later
--
oh, brother, would she worry! But she didn't think about that now. She ripped him tightly, feeling the beginning of the slow rise of absolute fulfillment and giving herself to it.

“Good looking?" Betty Pelecek said. She looked at Barby over the rim of her coke glass, her lips twisted scornfully. “I guess she's all right
--
if you like that kind. I like normal pie myself."

Through Barby's mind there flashed the names of half dozen hidden disabilities
--
TB, cancer, leukemia, all the names that flashed at you from billboards and magazine ipages. She said weakly, "Normal?"

"Sure, she's a Lesbian." Barby's puzzled expression was all the answer she needed. "Don't you know what a Lesbian is? it's a woman who likes other women.”

"Well, I like other women. Don't you?"

"To go to bed with, stupid. Instead of men."

"But I don't see how
--
" She ran through her considerable knowledge of the relationship between men and women. "I mean, what do they
do?"

Betty shrugged. Either she didn't know, or, more likely, she considered it an unfit subject to discuss at a drugstore counter. "They find ways," she said darkly. "They're not like other people." She gathered up her handbag, gloves and packages, preparatory to getting down from the high stool. "We better get back. She'll give us both hell if we're late. Unless," she said maliciously, "you're teacher's pet or something."

Barby frowned. Betty sounded so positive; surely you couldn't make up a thing like that, and yet she didn't see how it could be possible. Fragments of talk, ignored at the time; allusions in books; clinical-sounding magazine articles
--
this might explain a great deal she had ignored or dimly wondered about. "Anyway," she said, "I don't think Miss Gordon could be one. She looks like anybody else."

"You can't always tell. Sometimes they dress in men's clothes. But other times you can't tell them from ordinary people."

"Well, but
--
what people do is their own business." She fell silent, knowing that Betty didn't agree. When someone in the department got married it was Betty who made a note of the date, to compare it later with the arrival of the first baby; she seemed to know what every girl in Blouses and Sportswear did over the week end and which ones were sleeping around, what married employees were two-timing their husbands and which of the floor managers and department heads got fresh with the girls. Her gimlet gaze frightened Barby, conscious as she was of all she had to hide. She tried to avoid Betty, and when there was no way to avoid a coke break or lunch hour with her, she breathed easier when it was time to get back to work.

She looked at Miss Gordon with new curiosity when they reached the Store, half expecting to discover some disfigurement she hadn't noticed before. But Miss Gordon looked quite ordinary: neat, attractive, with a pleasant smile. In her dealings with the other supervisors and the salespeople she was both relaxed and capable, as if she knew her value to the company and, at the same time, recognized an obligation to do her best. Her girls didn't loaf when she was around, didn't sneak off to the washroom for a smoke or spend their time visiting, but Barby had never heard her reprimand anyone. She didn't have to.
If
she's a--if she's one of those,
Barby thought confusedly, feeling Miss Gordon's eyes on her and blushing,
they can't be so terrible. Anything she did would have to be all right.

She thought about it a great deal, and suddenly it seemed to her that Miss Gordon was everywhere she went
--
in the elevator before and after work, in the third-floor washroom, in the corner drugstore when she stopped for a box of Kleenex. She stopped at the long worktable where the girls were sewing tags in the $3.98 blouses, and stood for long time looking at Barby. The look went through her like a ray of sunshine and left her feeling warm and shaky, so that she sat for a while doing nothing. Then, catching Betty's eyes on her, she got briskly to work. But she couldn't shake off the memory of that deep, questioning look.

They fell into step at lunchtime the next day, reaching the street together; Barby stood back to let Miss Gordon through the revolving door first, and was glad but somehow not surprised that she waited. "Alone? Then why don't you have lunch with me? My treat, of course." She looked at Barby, thoughtfully. "You needn't mention it to the other girls, though."

Barby nodded. Nobody is lower in the department-store hierarchy than a stock girl, unless it's the man who sweeps or the drabbled women who come in at night to scrub, stock girl is nobody. Even if she is the owner's daughter, learning the business from the ground up, within the walls the Store she is without status. Barby knew and accepted this. Dimly, though, she realized that something more underlay Miss Gordon's admonition. She walked silently, excited and a little frightened.

They went to a little restaurant tucked away between o taller buildings, a dark little cubbyhole lighted by dies and frequented by couples who looked ardently at each other across the small linen-draped tables. Some of the couples, Barby noticed, were women. Miss Gordon ran a hand through her hair, ruffling it, and smiled. "I love this place," she said softly. "Glass of wine while you're waiting?”