Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (25 page)

“That belongs to my granddaughter visiting us!”

Why had she called out that? She and Viola did not know the Kings well; they never visited back and forth. He was friendly enough, in what seemed a half-professional way, but she was cool. They did little work on their yard. She had worked in the town library, until she got sick. Dorothy and Viola were more apt to see her there than around her own house. She wore a college girl's skirt and sweater, a barrette in her shoulder-length hair (she was the
college
girl of fifteen years ago, she hadn't kept up with the times in quite the way Jeanette had) and she had a low-pitched well-bred voice that many people in town found subtly insulting. Also such confidence and homeliness as Dorothy had seldom seen met together in one face.

“Good-looking men will often pick a girl like that,” Viola said. “Could it be they are not interested in looks when they have got so much themselves?”

Blair King in a neighborly way approached the porch, but did not come up. Instead he rested a foot on the step and leaned on his knee. He was good-looking, but his looks were getting set, worn. His smile, like his voice, was accomplished, mechanical. The trouble with his wife was telling on him.

“I've been admiring her car every time I go in and out.”

“She bought it in Europe last year and had it shipped back. How is your wife?”

It did not bother Dorothy to ask that, though she knew the story: Nancy King was dying of cancer. Death at thirty-six might be tragic, but she no longer, to tell the truth, understood the meaning of the word tragic. She asked to make conversation.

“She's not too uncomfortable at the moment.”

“Is it hot in the hospital?” She kept him talking because an idea was coming to her.

“The new wing is all air conditioned.”

“I asked Blair King next door,” said Dorothy. “I asked him to come over and spend the evening with us.”

“You inviting people,” said Viola. “What next? The skies may fall.”

“I don't know what we'll give him,” she said later. “He'll probably expect a drink. Those radio people don't go out for the evening and drink tea.”

“Radio people?” said Jeanette. “I thought it sounded like a fancy name. A
media
name.”

“Where is that sherry?” said Dorothy. She did not drink; she had been telling the truth when she reported that smoking was her only vice; but Viola had got to like sherry
in her bank-managing-hostessing days, and usually kept a bottle of it in the house.

“How can we offer him sherry?” Viola appealed to Jeanette. “You know what they always call sherry?
The old ladies' drink
.”

“I'll go to the liquor store,” Jeanette said comfortingly, “and get a bottle of gin, and I'll pick up some tonic and see if I can get a few limes, and that will be very nice on a hot night. Nobody can complain of a gin and tonic.”

Viola was still not satisfied. “He'll want something to eat.”

“Cucumber sandwiches,” said Dorothy.

“Lovely. Like Oscar Wilde,” said Jeanette mystifyingly. “I'll pick up a cucumber too.” She rebraided her hair, humming—happy at the prospect of getting out by herself for half an hour?—and ran out to her car, singing, “Gin a-and ton-ic, lime a-and cucumber—”

“She is going to the stores in her bare feet,” said Viola.

In the middle of the afternoon Jeanette lay out in the back yard, in the sun. Viola could not see her, that was something to be thankful for. “Is that what passes for a bikini?” Viola would have said. “I thought it was a couple of ribbons she had tied around herself.”

But Viola's bedroom was at the front of the house, Dorothy's at the back. They always took afternoon naps, it broke up the day. When she was a teacher, Dorothy had thought of afternoon naps as a summer luxury. Teaching tired her during the last years, and she did not even have the whole summer to herself, since the Department of Education in its infinite wisdom had decided that she should spent three weeks living in a hot rented room in Toronto taking courses that would enable her to introduce new methods and perspectives into her classroom teaching. (Naturally,
she did nothing of the sort, but went on successfully teaching just as she always had.) When she came home from Toronto, there was Jeanette. But Jeanette did little to upset her pattern of life, and she would go upstairs every afternoon and stretch out for her nap. Sometimes she pictured Jeanette downstairs in the living room, reading a book, or out on the porch lying in the swing, with one foot now and then tapping the floor boards, to keep the swing rocking, and she wondered whether the child was happy, whether she ought to be doing more things for her—taking her to the new swimming pool, registering her for tennis lessons. Then she remembered that Jeanette was too big to be taken anywhere, and if she wanted tennis lessons surely she would ask about them. Most of the time Jeanette liked to read. This was exactly what Dorothy herself had liked to do when she was young, and still did like to do. It seemed quite natural to them both to sit through meals together, each of them reading a book. Now Jeanette seemed to read very little. Perhaps her education had made her tired of it.

Dorothy was less curious in those days. In the classroom, she never sought to know anything but whether her pupils had grasped those principles of arithmetic and spelling, those facts of history and science and geography which it was her duty to teach them. She saw Jeanette as a shy serious girl, a bit older than her pupils. Studious was the word she would have used for her, an old-fashioned word. She believed then, without having to inquire or think about it, that Jeanette was in some important way a continuation of herself. This was not apparent any longer; the connection had either broken or gone invisible. Dorothy looked down for some time from her bedroom window at her granddaughter's spare brown body, as if it were a hieroglyph on her grass.

“And on the M1—” said Blair King despairingly, sitting on the side porch drinking gin. It was Jeanette he despaired
to. Dorothy followed the conversation with attention, but not with ease.

“Oh, the M1! That was the worst experience of my life, driving down to London in the fog, and they do sixty in the fog, you can't do less, pure fog and you literally cannot see ten feet. My friend and I had just hired a camper, and I wasn't even that used to driving it, and we got into one of those roundabouts and we couldn't get off. We literally couldn't see where to get off and we were going round and round forever, it was like some very symbolic undergraduate play.”

Did Blair King know what she meant? He seemed to. He watched her face and murmured encouragingly. This was the first Dorothy had heard of the camper, or the friend, or for that matter of the M1. To her grandmother and Viola, Jeanette had not said much more about Europe than that most places were overrun with tourists, the houses in Greece were clammy in the winter, and that frozen fish brought in from Athens cost less than local fish caught by the villagers. She had described some things they ate, until Viola said she felt queasy.

Was the friend a man friend or a girl? Dorothy could tell Viola was wondering.

Blair King and his wife had spent six months in Europe three years ago. He did not let them forget her. Nancy and I. Nancy did the driving in Switzerland. Nancy loved Portugal but didn't care as much for Spain. Nancy preferred the Portuguese style of bullfighting. Viola got in her oar occasionally about the three weeks she and her husband had spent in Great Britain in 1956. Dorothy sat and listened and sipped her drink, which she did not like the taste of, thought Jeanette had promised to be parsimonious with the gin. She could not complain, really, even if she had trouble keeping up with what they said. This was what she had been counting on—that Blair King might turn out to be more the sort of person Jeanette was used to, that she could talk to, and that she herself listening to this talk could get a
better idea of what Jeanette was like than she had been able to get up to now. So she sat concentrating, with not much more than the sound of their voices to concentrate on, because it was dark on the porch. Shall we turn the lights on, Dorothy had asked, and Jeanette had cried no, no, then it's like sitting in a hot little box here with all the bugs beating at the screen.

“I don't mind sitting in the dark do you?” she said to Blair King, and Dorothy caught something in her tone—was it arch, deferential, disparaging?—that she put away for future consideration.

They talked about food and drink and illness and medicine and a strange doctor in Crete who assumed, Jeanette said, that all foreign women who consulted him had come for an abortion, so that he could only with the greatest difficulty be persuaded to treat a sore throat. Blair King told about a doctor in Spain, consulted for Nancy's stomach trouble, who had given her such a rending purgative that two hours later, in the Alhambra, she was doubled up, desperate.

“That's what Nancy always remembers about Spain. Here we are in this incredibly beautiful place we've seen all the pictures of, and it was one of the places Nancy had most looked forward to seeing, and we can only think of one thing—where is the ladies' john?”

“Ah, one's baser needs,” said Jeanette, mock-solemnly. “One's baser needs are so inconvenient. They get to be so important. I remember my first stoopers. On the boat to Greece.”

Is that the way men and women talk to each other nowadays?
Dorothy could tell Viola was thinking. And further:
No wonder she isn't married
.

“And for Nancy, of course. Nancy is dignified. You haven't met her. She isn't anything you would call a snob, but she is—well, I used to think of her as the sorority-girl type.”

“Ah,” said Jeanette, combining flattery and a delicate
sort of contempt in a way that Blair King was probably not even aware of, going on talking about his wife. What was Jeanette up to? Was this flirtation, some new style of it? In spite of all her talking and animation there was something quite still about Jeanette, something not playful, but acquiescent, almost forlorn.

They had progressed from talking about doctors to talking about places where people would rob you blind, and other places where you could leave an unlocked, loaded car for days parked safely on the street. “In North Africa I had everything stolen,” said Jeanette. “I had everything stolen even though the camper was locked. I was alone by that time, my friend and I had separated and I felt badly about that too—”
So it was a man
, thought Dorothy, but immediately had to correct herself and think,
unless it was a girl, and they were
—Sometimes she wished she had not kept up with the world as she had done, reading.

“It was in Marrakesh,” Jeanette said. “I had everything, everything, stolen, lovely things—Moroccan dresses, cloth I had bought for friends, jewelry—as well as my camera naturally and all the stuff I had come with. I just sat there all alone in my camper and I cried. And then two young Arab boys—well, not boys really, young Arab
men
—but they were very slender and at first I took them for younger than they were—they came by and saw me and stopped and tried to talk to me. One spoke English quite well. At first I wouldn't even talk to them, I hated all Arabs, hated all Moroccans, I blamed them personally for my stuff being stolen. I wouldn't even tell them what had happened but they kept on at me—or the one that talked did—until I finally quite rudely explained, and they said, you must go to the police. Ha, I said, the police were probably watching them do it. But they finally persuaded me to go. They got in and directed. It did cross my mind that they were probably not taking me to the police at all and that I was being totally stupid, but I really didn't care much. And do you know
what? I was inclined to trust the one talking to me, because he had
blue eyes
. What abysmal prejudice;
Nazis
had blue eyes. But his eyes made me feel more comfortable somehow and I went along even when we had to leave the camper and walk through all those twisty turny smelly streets in the Arab quarter, and by the time I knew for sure we weren't going to the police I couldn't have found my way back anyhow. You're not taking me to the police, are you, I said, and they said no. Not right away, the blue-eyed one said. I'm going to take you home and introduce you to my mother!”