The Wintering (24 page)

Remember how Momma always sayed, “Live so that if your hen have eggs, your neighbor got eggs”? But Vern don't want to listen, not to nothing. Standing out on the porch thinking I don't see him. I wanted to say, I see you, baby. Thing is, you don't see me. I know what he do see. He see me coming across the flo' with these big old bosoms shaking and Mister Jeff's slippers flopping on my feets. Can't keep nothing on my feets but house shoes. I can't go on no march. I told Vern, though, if it give him hope, then march. Miss Amelia say these corns come from shoes too little. Me and her been treating ours together. Vern don't want to hear, time was when didn't colored or white folks have nothing round in this part of the country. Think nobody have had such a hard time as him. That's young people. Mrs. Uncle Tom; Vern thinking that just as clear. Here I'm at, boy. I just soon tell him so. He in the shadows whispering, “How long 'fore you can go?” I sayed, “I ain't coming.” Then he say, “They won't let you off?” He sho quick to bitter. I sayed I been coming and going here like I wants all the time I been here. I ain't coming 'cause I ain't coming. Too old. Lord have mercy so much angry in young peoples today. I sayed I'd stay home and read the Bible. Only place they is any religion left. And pray Vern don't kill somebody yet. Then Mister Jeff seed him and say, “Hidy, Vern,” and act like he don't notice Vern don't say “Hidy” back. I told Vern, “Wait,” then go on 'bout his business. Them stairs is gettin' me down. I brought me back this book I had did cut the insides out one time, and Vern knowed what was in it. I told him, “This the place we got to live. We got to get along. But take this on to meeting and when you at the lunch counter, buy something on me.” He sayed, “I ain't got served yet.” I sayed he would be. He sayed, “Aun-tee, you give me it all? Three hundred dollars. That is all you got in this world.” And I sayed, “You wrong about that.”

Mister Jeff ast me, “Did he come for you to go to church?” I sayed, “I ain't going to meeting, my corns hurts me too bad.” He sayed, “He's gone then?” and I sayed, “Gone, now, but you ain't seed the last of Vern.” Then Mister Jeff say Miss Amelia want him to find out what is the matter and don't anybody care I have did burned the dinner and the cake, but they care about what is the matter and have he or her or Miss Inga did something wrong? So I sayed, No, they have not, that something just been on my mind that's settled now. Then he look up quick knowing it have to be something about Vern, what I give him, or me not going to meeting. I sayed, “What the young peoples do is what they is going to do and I am too old to take part. I have give all I can. Tell Miss Amelia everything going to be the way it was befo'.”

Then Mister Jeff up like a shot. I thought he had did seed something out in the yard. I didn't seed nothing. The ground could be turned soon and I sayed, “Carry us up to the Western Auto. We could be picking us out some seeds.” But Mister Jeff already going out saying, “I won't be here come springtime, after all.”

“But why the train?”

Amy thought of her mother and father asking why take two days when she could get there in a few hours. She could not have explained it was because she did not want to go. They would have asked, then, the expected, Why go? And she could not have explained. But on the bus, having left Jeff, she had stared out at kudzu vine being beaten frenziedly by the rain, later dashing itself onto Delton's streets, knowing that she had to leave. Two Negroes on the bus had loudly argued and her seat companion, redolent of false-teeth cleanser, leaning close had said, “They're so shortly out of Africa, you know, we're not safe.” Turning away, Amy had thought more resolutely that she was going.

Spring was a fantasy, the conglomerate colors of the countryside, swiftly viewed from the train, were like a carnival, with redbud and forsythia and jonquils fusing, though nothing of the startling sweetness of the outdoors disturbed the stale air in the sleeping coach. In New York, the intense explosion of the season was sidewalks filled. Under striped umbrellas, like fairytale mushrooms, men sold hot dogs, their signs also reading Bagels. Feeling she had plunged into a new life, Amy determined to try everything; though, parsimoniously, she held close her purse pretending she must be careful of money. She had decided to accept only income from stocks in her name. Then, at the last moment, relenting, she took a large check from her father. The spring wind now was chill and blew cinders along the street.

Sitting in a taxi, Amy tried to recall Nancy, her college roommate, and could remember only someone faceless who always wore plaid shorts bicycling. When Nancy had written that she was moving from her parents' uptown apartment, downtown to Greenwich Village, Amy had decided to join her. Nancy had written that she was not even going home for weekends, which Amy had felt showed true independence.

Now, she felt pressed in upon by small worries, riding along, and was disappointed to find she could not yet meet every situation with the aplomb she wanted. The phrase “cool as a cucumber” went through her mind. With suitcases falling over onto her and nibbling a cuticle, she worried about how much to tip the driver and whether Nancy would be at home to let her in; if not, how she was going to manage her luggage alone? She had foolishly expected, in her first moment of freedom, to be without confusions. Instead, she was filled with small ones. Staring out at muddled streets, Amy wondered whether she had made a mistake to leave home. Perhaps her father did love her and maybe her mother had meant something besides what she had said. “Amy, if you go away, I'll never get you into Junior League,” Edith had cried despairingly.

“In New York for a visit, young lady?” the taxi driver asked. He waited comfortably behind his wheel while Amy dragged her suitcases to the sidewalk. “To get a job,” she said. “Good luck to you,” he said. She tipped him too much, not only because she was fearful of not giving enough, but because she wanted to feel one of all the small working people up against the world.

Her new residence she thought marvellously depressing, with haphazard and dented garbage cans lining the sidewalk in front. The building seemed squeezed in as an afterthought to fill up space between two larger ones. Not only were the mailbox slots inside glassless, the foyer could hold only one suitcase at a time. Nancy's white card, in one slot, stood out from the others, clean and engraved. Having buzzed, Amy was admitted through a second door. Propping it open, she dragged her suitcases from the sidewalk into the hall, expecting Nancy to run helpfully down the stairs. When only silence came, she started up, dragging the heaviest bag. Random lights gave the stairwell a dim, dirtyish and appropriate air, but Amy hoped there were not roaches or rats. Rounding the first landing, she was disappointed that a baby cried behind an apartment door and that there were cooking smells and the sounds of tables being set. She had expected all the boring details of the everyday world to have disappeared. Down the roundy stairwell, making no move but to lean over the bannister, Nancy cried, “Don't give up! There are only three more flights.”

Amy, banging her suitcase a step at a time, calculated how many more trips she would have to make. Nancy's accent had sounded much more nasal and Northern than she had remembered. Nancy did cry and dance when Amy arrived breathlessly. Hugging her, Nancy shouted, at last they were free! They went into the apartment, where she hoped Amy would not mind that she had gone ahead and decorated. Nancy announced proudly that she had made the curtains and bedspreads herself.

“Oh,” Amy said, looking around, “I didn't know you
sewed.
” Catching the slighting tone, Nancy said that indeed she did sew and making it more obvious she pulled slightly out of its corner her shiny walnut-cased machine. What else, Amy wondered, in this first moment of coexistence, could she have said except that she liked the furnishings? But, regrettably, the apartment looked cozy. The curtains and bedspreads were all chintz when she had envisioned filling it more modernly, with colorful burlap curtains and sling chairs. Nancy had lacquered a coffee table pink. On it were overlapping copies of
Vogue
. Nancy beamed at having coordinated the apartment, carrying pink from room to room. Amy was taken around to see a fuzzy pink toilet seat cover and dish-towels with hand-screened pink carnations. In the bedroom to which she was assigned were pink velvet accent pillows. “You don't mind having the alcove?” Nancy asked. Glancing at the things Amy had brought up, she added, as if it were not an afterthought, that Amy would have more space for her typewriter.

Later, when Amy set her emptied teacup on the pink coffee table, Nancy immediately whisked it to the sink and rinsed the cup. Rightly and immediately, Amy guessed the main thought in Nancy's mind was getting married. After dinner they settled into an awkward silence, until Nancy decided to phone her family. Listening to the conversation, Amy grew lonesome thinking of the unavailability of her own parents. Nancy, in bed, fell instantly asleep. Lying in her own bed and hearing hatefully the even breathing, Amy decided only brainless people did not lie awake a long time, thinking. Wide-eyed, she stared at the chintz ruffles shadowed here on the wall, like the ones in her bedroom at home. The difference was that at home, her curtains were reflected by moonlight, and here a street light shone annoyingly into her window. She almost listened for the smooth running of Edith's heavy curtains along their antiqued rod. Young men passed along the street and yelled curses, in loud voices, more vile than any she had ever heard. Amy, smiling, thought that at last she was beginning to live, that each new experience would add up to some large meaning of her life.

The next evening, Nancy sauntered in and announced without the faintest embarrassment that she had taken a job with a friend of her father's, in an advertising agency. Advertising! Amy thought. She trudged the city endlessly that day looking for a job. That, she thought, had been the point, to struggle and to poke about in sections of the city she would not see otherwise. Her suspicions about Nancy were further confirmed when she told about the “darling boy” who worked in the office. Amy realized sadly that Nancy had less sense of adventure than anyone she had ever known.

Every day, roaming the city, Amy thought with disgust of Nancy safely in her Madison Avenue office. Determined to live a life different from what she had known, she sought out shoddy places for lunch. A tiny cafeteria on Fourteenth Street smelled of cabbage and soured sponges used to wipe the tables. But the oily food was cheap. Inside, someone always was asleep or drunk, which was picturesque. Then one day, the counterman leaned over the steam table, with a sweating face, and said, “Honey, one of your stockings is falling down.”

Amy stood stock-still, mortified, while an old man, eating soup, looked up at her dumbly and questioning, What was she going to do? She wondered even if there were a ladies room whether she would dare use it. She thought suspicious diseases came from bathrooms. Certainly they might in a place like this. A sense of unbelonging as well as one of embarrassment flooded her. Turning, Amy went out with a stricken face. On the street, she tried to straighten the stocking, but several people watched. She then went on, with it slightly droopy. Standing on a corner, she ate a dry bagel for lunch, wondering if her life were to be forever a multiplicity of confusing details.

To take a job meant she might make a mistake; suppose, accepting one position, she heard later of something better? Her days continued to be filled with job-hunting. To give them more point, she began keeping her diary again, convincing herself that every minor incident would eventually have importance.

Monday. I took the wrong subway and couldn't get off until I got all the way to Queens!

Tuesday. I've been discriminated against! I answered an ad for a stock girl at a famous hat shop, and they said they preferred Negro girls! That should make a great short story but should that be the beginning, the middle or the ending?

When Nancy was told the incident, she stared at Amy blankly. Why did she want to apply for so menial a job? Pitying her, Amy knew there was no sense trying to explain. Nancy went regularly to her office, then out with the “darling boy,” leaving Amy alone most evenings. She began to sleep late every morning, telling herself, the first one, that she had a sore throat. But the week stretched out, and the next began. Only desultorily afterward did she search for a job, infrequent afternoons. She often reread the letter from Jeff her mother had sent, keeping it in her pocketbook always with her. Readdressed in her mother's handwriting, the letter, to Amy's surprise, held no cautions or explanations when she really longed for her mother to have advised, See him, or don't!

Nancy's engagement was announced, and Amy thought, haughtily, she could certainly find someone better than Nancy had. When the young man came to dinner, she asked if he had read
Reconstruction
. Without glancing at Nancy, she tried to pretend it was not surprising her fiancé had never heard of Almoner. “He's a writer Amy knows,” Nancy said lamely.

The young man never understood exactly why, but, always uncomfortable around Amy, he would not come back to dinner. He then took Nancy out and Amy was more alone. She had a few dates with college friends, but they all ended in mutual lack of interest. But somewhere in the whole Village wasn't there an artistic person she could go out with, or even marry? A painter or an architect. Someone in a creative field. A young Almoner, destined for fame. Though she would not marry the first person who asked her, as Nancy had. If only Nancy had been honest about her intentions from the beginning, she would not have a roommate sewing a trousseau. She had needed someone as interested as she in finding out meanings, Amy thought.

The apartment's silence began to be oppressive. Nancy stayed at her parents' on weekends. Amy, growing tired of wandering about the Village, some mornings washed underwear and straightened her drawers. She feared that when she was not there, Nancy had peeked into them, horrified. Opening them herself, she sometimes had felt overwhelmed and shut them quickly. She understood for the first time people committing suicide, particularly older people whose lives had come to nothing. She bought two goldfish, but it was enervating to change their water so frequently. Was it possible she would go on like this, grow old, and her life would never change?