Let Me Tell You (10 page)

Joyce Duncan's decision to go back was crystallized by the receipt of a letter from her mother, saying, in part, “Dear, your last letter sounded so lonely and sad; remember they say that whenever a woman feels low she can always cheer herself up by buying a new hat or a new dress, or both, so am enclosing a small check. Buy yourself something
silly.
” The check was just small enough not to matter enormously against the rent or the phone bill, and just large enough to make the trip a reality instead of the dim temptation it had been for so long.

“Jed,” she said, “I think I
will
go back. Just for a day or so.”

“It's your money,” he said, not even lifting his head to speak to her.

Perhaps if I can explain somehow, she thought, relate it to something
he
understands; perhaps then when I come back there might be a way we can start to talk to each other, perhaps even start over…“You see,” she said inadequately, “everything is so
wrong,
somehow. Maybe if I went back to where I started from, just for a while…”

“Go ahead,” he said.

“Maybe I'd be happier if I tried it,” Joyce said. “You see,” she went on, not wanting to explain but hoping that somehow it might make him turn at last and look at her, “there's a sort of mix-up that happened a long time ago that I'd like to straighten out. A…a lie.”

“I didn't know one lie more or less mattered to
you,
” he said, and turned a page of his book.

She knew by now that if she let the tears come into her eyes or her voice, Jed would only take his book and go into the bedroom to read. Helplessly she said, “I can't help feeling that if I go back and straighten things up
there,
maybe things
here
will be better. Maybe I've been off on a wrong track all these years just because of that one thing. Maybe when I come back, maybe you and I can…”

He stood up, his finger between the pages of his book. “Look,” he said tiredly, “maybe if you go back to that town, wherever it is, and un-lie yourself, you'll cancel out every lie you've told since. You might even cancel out all the unkind things you've
done
since. But I doubt it.”

“If you'd try to understand—” she began, but he closed the bedroom door so gently that he might not have heard her. I'll leave early in the morning, she thought; I'll leave before he's up and he can make his own stupid breakfast, and when I come back…

In the car the next morning, headed finally back exactly the way she had come here nearly ten years before, she found herself almost chanting, in a rhythm made up partly of the sound of the car wheels on the pavement, and partly the pulse of her own excitement: I'm going back, I'm going back. I should have done it much much sooner, she thought suddenly; things wouldn't have been as bad as this if I'd gone back before. Once it's done, she realized with triumph, I won't ever need to go back again. She tried to imagine what Jean Simpson's face was like, and found she thought instead about the pictures on the wall of the office; she thought she could remember Jean Simpson's voice, but all she could hear when she tried to think about it was her own voice, level and positive, saying “I saw her, it was Jean Simpson. I recognized her.”

I will tell her, she thought, recognizing that although she was driving on a wide and nearly empty highway she was going very slowly; I will tell her that I am more sorry than I can say, that I was wrong, that I realize now the injustice I did her. I could offer a public apology, she thought, and then: No, why submit her to that?

Milltown. Seventeen miles to Prospect, and it was barely ten-thirty. Perhaps Jean Simpson had moved away? Her family could not have afforded to leave Prospect; the only way a girl like that could get out of town was to move into a worse environment, and Jean had never been—this thought was oddly reassuring—a particularly
good
girl, not at all the sort of person one might be concerned about for the past ten years. She was not, actually, worth a second thought, but nevertheless Joyce Duncan, scrupulously honest, was coming back after all this time to right an old wrong.

I'm being ridiculous about this, she thought, driving more slowly still past Milltown and East Milltown; I'm thinking in terms of a major disaster and it
was
only a trifle. Perhaps I ought to take her something, some small thing to show I hold no grudge, a pretty scarf, perhaps, or a box of candy? She could hardly expect me to give her
money,
but perhaps a couple of pairs of stockings? Better let it wait until I've seen her, she told herself; she may be angry still and not want anything from me.

She had thought she would not remember this town after ten years, but she turned automatically onto the street that led to her old house without recognizing anything strange about her memory of it. When she stopped the car, she found it hard to look at the old house and imagine that it could have changed. “So that's it,” she said, half aloud. “Still here, after all.”

Until she stepped out of her car it was difficult to imagine herself as a stranger, trying to go back, but the minute she put her foot down onto the familiar sidewalk in front of her old house it was suddenly so surprising, so odd a combination of ten years gone and yet still present in her mind, that she had to turn and rest her hand upon the side of the car to steady herself. Joyce Richards, she thought, little Joyce Richards, not Mrs. Jed Duncan at all.

She felt wary of going too close to her old house, although she had been anxious to see it again; perhaps if she came within its reach it would capture her again, and never let her go this time. Or perhaps it was only because she was embarrassed about being seen by people looking out their windows and telling one another, “There's Joyce Richards come back. Thought she was doing so well in the city?” The sight of the house had reminded her of Mrs. Random, so she turned on the sidewalk and started up the path to the house next door. Once on the overgrown little path with Mrs. Random's house ahead of her, she realized at last that this was indescribably real, and it seemed to her for a moment that perhaps all this time she had been living in unreality, and waiting to awaken here again, where things were solid and the colors of the sky and the flowers and even the path were actual, real, unfaded. The door of the house was blue, and she thought that for years she had not known how blue that color could truly be.

Going up the path, she almost tasted the richness of color and form, and stopped—which she could never remember having done before—to look at, and finally touch, a rose, which bent slightly toward her and gave back to her touch a strong and soft pressure. She bent to see if it smelled as she remembered roses ought to smell, and it was heavy, rich, and lovely. Even the white doorstep amazed her eyes, and the knocker—had she ever seen another one like it?—was possessed of an actual weight of its own, so that it fell back from her hands and crashed loudly in the still morning.

Waiting on the shiny doorstep—was there city dirt on her shoes to soil its whiteness?—she listened to the odd, echoing house inside, and thought that within the city there was never any sense, even though people lived so close together, of that intimate knowledge of walls and floors and ceilings, and she remembered the distant sharp sound of voices in another room when she was a child and supposedly asleep in bed. She heard a footstep inside and then the door opened.

“Hello,” she said, wondering at the sound of her own voice, “it's Mrs. Random, isn't it?”

“Yes.” The eyes were not precisely suspicious; wary, rather, as of one who had dealt with personable salesladies and been taken in by supposed bargains.

“I'm Joyce Duncan. I used to be Joyce Richards.”

“Yes?”

“Don't you remember me?”

“No.”

“I used to live next door.”

The information was taken in and discarded. “Did you?”

“I used to play in your yard.” Desperately, she was spending information she had meant to use sparingly, dwelling on each remembered moment, hoping Mrs. Random might help her reconstruct her lost childhood. “Don't you remember?”

“So many people.” Mrs. Random waved vaguely at the house next door. “Can't remember
every
one, you know.”

“Well, I remember
you.
” She looked again at the clean housedress, pink imprinted with thousands of small flower sprigs, and thought that in that long-dead time Mrs. Random had worn either this, or one astonishingly like it, and that the same wisp of white hair had been lying against her cheek for all these years; had Mrs. Random, she wondered, then been this vague-eyed creature, hiding nervously behind her own door? “When my mother was sick you brought us a little roast chicken, and you came over when my father died,” she said, unwillingly. She was forced into this conversational coin; one had always collected news of deaths and miscarriages and broken legs for Mrs. Random's pleasure. She thought deeply. “I had pneumonia,” she added.

Mrs. Random's interest was caught and she frowned, trying to remember. “Williams?” she asked.

“Richards. I was Joyce Richards. My father was John Richards, and he was the clerk in the railroad station. You used to say that I could hardly wait to get away from town, the way I used to spend all my time at the station watching the trains.”

“Richards?” said Mrs. Random wonderingly. “You must have gone away at last, then,” she added intelligently. “I heard it said you were in the city.”

Joyce smiled, thinking that her smile, warm and proud and altogether the secret pleasant smile of a woman happy and secure, was not entirely a lie; by Mrs. Random's standards she had certainly done very well for herself. “I'm married now,” she said, still smiling. “My husband's a wonderful man.”

“Girls ought to get married,” Mrs. Random said, with a sudden odd, perceptive glance at Joyce. “Keeps them out of trouble. Your old house is still there,” she went on, “but no one's living in it. Probably open.”

“I may still have a key to it,” said Joyce, ashamed to admit that she had carried it on her key ring all these years.

“Go on in, then,” said Mrs. Random generously, free with any invitation except one into her own house. “Been a lot of people in and out of there, all these years.”

Joyce lingered on the doorstep, even though Mrs. Random showed signs of wanting to withdraw and close the door. “Whatever happened to the Collinses, used to live on the other side of us?”

“Collins?” said Mrs. Random vaguely. “Can't recall the name. It was Williams lived
there.
”

“The Cartwrights across the street?”

“Moved, I suppose,” said Mrs. Random.

“And Bob Cartwright?”

“Now,” said Mrs. Random, “I
do
recall a Bob Cartwright. Married that plain girl. Got a little grocery or some such down on Railroad Street.”

“Bob is married?”

“I get
my
groceries at Wingdon's,” Mrs. Random pointed out, as though it were necessary to establish this fact clearly and immediately. “Come back again sometime,” she said.

This time she closed the door flatly, obviously having concluded that otherwise there would be no end to this conversation, and perhaps feeling that there was no harm in closing the door against the face of someone she would probably never see again.

The roses turned slightly away from Joyce as she went down the path, and she wondered that she had ever felt free with them or if it could be true that she had once been punished for the desecration of picking one. She could see the house next door, but the hedge between had grown so dense that it did not seem likely her private path through it still existed. Nothing, she realized now, had been tended for years; she could see that on the house next door a second-story window frame sagged against the shingles, and bricks were gone from the chimney.

I certainly won't go in there
now,
she thought, not with Mrs. Random peering out from behind her curtains to see if I'll try to steal the doors or make off with part of the fence; I'll come back later. Perhaps, too, if she visited other old acquaintances and checked on other landmarks, she might approach this house again, later in the day or perhaps even tomorrow, more in the spirit in which she had left it, less as a stranger whom Mrs. Random could not remember. She realized that she had not asked Mrs. Random about Jean Simpson, and wondered if there were anything about her that Mrs. Random might have remembered.

She got back into her car, aware of Mrs. Random's critical eye from the downstairs window, and drove down the street, thinking, as she passed the streetlights and the curbs and the paths into gardens, of how many times, and always alone, she had walked and run and scuffled and skipped rope down this street. She would idle with one foot in the gutter and one on the curb, stepping gingerly in high-heeled shoes, hoping someone would notice her and speak to her, afraid sometimes, and sometimes elated, on her way to school, or to play alone in the park, and always thinking of the time when she would be rich and successful and would come back to walk with scorn past the people who had never noticed her then.

She had always come this way, because the street ended shortly beyond her old house and fell away into fields and trees, although it might be that they had put a road through there now, since there were certainly new houses farther down the street than she remembered. Even though she was driving, which she had never done here before, she found that she was turning the car along the same old ways. She watched along the sidewalk, as she drove slowly, for her old footprints, perhaps even expecting that—as though they had told her that the old Joyce had gone on ahead, and could probably be caught up with on the way—upon turning a corner she might see, halfway down the block ahead, herself in a pink sweater and a white linen skirt, on her way to the library, carrying a book or a white patent leather purse, striding along—was she not always a little bit late?—and not turning to look at cars passing by. “Joyce,” she wanted to call, “Joyce, wait a minute, I want to tell you something.”