Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (9 page)

Some clothes in her closet she wore all the time, I was quite familiar with them. Others she never put on, they were pushed to the back. I was disappointed to see no wedding dress. But there was one long dress I could just see the skirt of, and I was hungering to see the rest. Now I took note of where it hung and lifted it out. It was satin, a lovely weight on my arm, light bluish-green in color, almost silvery. It had a fitted, pointed waist and a full skirt and an off-the-shoulder fold hiding the little sleeves.

Next thing was easy. I got out of my own things and slipped it on. I was slimmer at fifteen than anybody would believe who knows me now and the fit was beautiful. I didn't, of course, have a strapless bra on, which was what it needed, I just had to slide my straps down my arms under the material. Then I tried pinning up my hair, to get the effect. One thing led to another. I put on rouge and lipstick and eyebrow pencil from her dresser. The heat of the day and the weight of the satin and all the excitement made me thirsty, and I went out to the kitchen, got-up as I was, to get
a glass of ginger ale with ice cubes from the refrigerator. The Peebles drank ginger ale, or fruit drinks, all day, like water, and I was getting so I did too. Also there was no limit on ice cubes, which I was so fond of I would even put them in a glass of milk.

I turned from putting the ice tray back and saw a man watching me through the screen. It was the luckiest thing in the world I didn't spill the ginger ale down the front of me then and there.

“I never meant to scare you. I knocked but you were getting the ice out, you didn't hear me.”

I couldn't see what he looked like, he was dark the way somebody is pressed up against a screen door with the bright daylight behind them. I only knew he wasn't from around here.

“I'm from the plane over there. My name is Chris Watters and what I was wondering was if I could use that pump.”

There was a pump in the yard. That was the way the people used to get their water. Now I noticed he was carrying a pail.

“You're welcome,” I said. “I can get it from the tap and save you pumping.” I guess I wanted him to know we had piped water, didn't pump ourselves.

“I don't mind the exercise.” He didn't move, though, and finally he said, “Were you going to a dance?”

Seeing a stranger there had made me entirely forget how I was dressed.

“Or is that the way ladies around here generally get dressed up in the afternoon?”

I didn't know how to joke back then. I was too embarrassed.

“You live here? Are you the lady of the house?”

“I'm the hired girl.”

Some people change when they find that out, their whole way of looking at you and speaking to you changes, but his didn't.

“Well, I just wanted to tell you you look very nice. I was so surprised when I looked in the door and saw you. Just because you looked so nice and beautiful.”

I wasn't even old enough then to realize how out of the common it is, for a man to say something like that to a woman, or somebody he is treating like a woman. For a man to say a word like
beautiful
. I wasn't old enough to realize or to say anything back, or in fact to do anything but wish he would go away. Not that I didn't like him, but just that it upset me so, having him look at me, and me trying to think of something to say.

He must have understood. He said good-bye, and thanked me, and went and started filling his pail from the pump. I stood behind the Venetian blinds in the dining room, watching him. When he had gone, I went into the bedroom and took the dress off and put it back in the same place. I dressed in my own clothes and took my hair down and washed my face, wiping it on Kleenex, which I threw in the wastebasket.

The Peebles asked me what kind of man he was. Young, middle-aged, short, tall? I couldn't say.

“Good-looking?” Dr. Peebles teased me.

I couldn't think a thing but that he would be coming to get his water again, he would be talking to Dr. or Mrs. Peebles, making friends with them, and he would mention seeing me that first afternoon, dressed up. Why not mention it? He would think it was funny. And no idea of the trouble it would get me into.

After supper the Peebles drove into town to go to a movie. She wanted to go somewhere with her hair fresh done. I sat in my bright kitchen wondering what to do, knowing I would never sleep. Mrs. Peebles might not fire me, when she found out, but it would give her a different feeling about me altogether. This was the first place I ever
worked but I already had picked up things about the way people feel when you are working for them. They like to think you aren't curious. Not just that you aren't dishonest, that isn't enough. They like to feel you don't notice things, that you don't think or wonder about anything but what they liked to eat and how they like things ironed, and so on. I don't mean they weren't kind to me, because they were. They had me eat my meals with them (to tell the truth I expected to, I didn't know there were families who don't) and sometimes they took me along in the car. But all the same.

I went up and checked on the children being asleep and then I went out. I had to do it. I crossed the road and went in the old fairgrounds gate. The plane looked unnatural sitting there, and shining with the moon. Off at the far side of the fairgrounds, where the bush was taking over, I saw his tent.

He was sitting outside it smoking a cigarette. He saw me coming.

“Hello, were you looking for a plane ride? I don't start taking people up till tomorrow.” Then he looked again and said, “Oh, it's you. I didn't know you without your long dress on.”

My heart was knocking away, my tongue was dried up. I had to say something. But I couldn't. My throat was closed and I was like a deaf-and-dumb.

“Did you want a ride? Sit down. Have a cigarette.”

I couldn't even shake my head to say no, so he gave me one.

“Put it in your mouth or I can't light it. It's a good thing I'm used to shy ladies.”

I did. It wasn't the first time I had smoked a cigarette, actually. My girl friend out home, Muriel Lower, used to steal them from her brother.

“Look at your hand shaking. Did you just want to have a chat, or what?”

In one burst I said, “I wisht you wouldn't say anything about that dress.”

“What dress? Oh, the long dress.”

“It's Mrs. Peebles'.”

“Whose?” Oh, the lady you work for? Is that it? She wasn't home so you got dressed up in her dress, eh? You got dressed up and played queen. I don't blame you. You're not smoking that cigarette right. Don't just puff. Draw it in. Did nobody ever show you how to inhale? Are you scared I'll tell on you? Is that it?”

I was so ashamed at having to ask him to connive this way I couldn't nod. I just looked at him and he saw
yes
.

“Well I won't. I won't in the slightest way mention it or embarrass you. I give you my word of honor.”

Then he changed the subject, to help me out, seeing I couldn't even thank him.

“What do you think of this sign?”

It was a board sign lying practically at my feet.

SEE THE WORLD FROM THE SKY. ADULTS $1.00
,
CHILDREN 50¢
.
QUALIFIED PILOT
.

“My old sign was getting pretty beat up, I thought I'd make a new one. That's what I've been doing with my time today.”

The lettering wasn't all that handsome, I thought. I could have done a better one in half an hour.

“I'm not an expert at sign making.”

“It's very good,” I said.

“I don't need it for publicity, word of mouth is usually enough. I turned away two carloads tonight. I felt like taking it easy. I didn't tell them ladies were dropping in to visit me.”

Now I remembered the children and I was scared again, in case one of them had waked up and called me and I wasn't there.

“Do you have to go so soon?”

I remembered some manners. “Thank you for the cigarette.”

“Don't forget. You have my word of honor.”

I tore off across the fairgrounds, scared I'd see the car heading home from town. My sense of time was mixed up, I didn't know how long I'd been out of the house. But it was all right, it wasn't late, the children were asleep. I got in bed myself and lay thinking what a lucky end to the day, after all, and among things to be grateful for I could be grateful Loretta Bird hadn't been the one who caught me.

The yard and borders didn't get trampled, it wasn't as bad as that. All the same it seemed very public, around the house. The sign was on the fairgrounds gate. People came mostly after supper but a good many in the afternoon, too. The Bird children all came without fifty cents between them and hung on the gate. We got used to the excitement of the plane coming in and taking off, it wasn't excitement any more. I never went over, after that one time, but would see him when he came to get his water. I would be out on the steps doing sitting-down work, like preparing vegetables, if I could.

“Why don't you come over? I'll take you up in my plane.”

“I'm saving my money,” I said, because I couldn't think of anything else.

“For what? For getting married?”

I shook my head.

“I'll take you up for free if you come sometime when it's slack. I thought you would come, and have another cigarette.”

I made a face to hush him, because you never could tell when the children would be sneaking around the porch, or Mrs. Peebles herself listening in the house. Sometimes she came out and had a conversation with him. He told her things he hadn't bothered to tell me. But then I hadn't thought to ask. He told her he had been in the War, that
was where he learned to fly a plane, and now he couldn't settle down to ordinary life, this was what he liked. She said she couldn't imagine anybody liking such a thing. Though sometimes, she said, she was almost bored enough to try anything herself, she wasn't brought up to living in the country. It's all my husband's idea, she said. This was news to me.

“Maybe you ought to give flying lessons,” she said.

“Would you take them?”

She just laughed.

Sunday was a busy flying day in spite of it being preached against from two pulpits. We were all sitting out watching. Joey and Heather were over on the fence with the Bird kids. Their father had said they could go, after their mother saying all week they couldn't.

A car came down the road past the parked cars and pulled up right in the drive. It was Loretta Bird who got out, all importance, and on the driver's side another woman got out, more sedately. She was wearing sunglasses.

“This is a lady looking for the man that flies the plane,” Loretta Bird said. “I heard her inquire in the hotel coffee shop where I was having a Coke and I brought her out.”

“I'm sorry to bother you,” the lady said. “I'm Alice Kelling, Mr. Watters' fiancée.”

This Alice Kelling had on a pair of brown and white checked slacks and a yellow top. Her bust looked to me rather low and bumpy. She had a worried face. Her hair had had a permanent, but had grown out, and she wore a yellow band to keep it off her face. Nothing in the least pretty or even young-looking about her. But you could tell from how she talked she was from the city, or educated, or both.