Stranger On Lesbos (20 page)

"Go ahead and say it. Since you and your crummy friends went to jail." His face darkened. "I suppose that was my fault."

"Yes, it was
if you really want to know. You don't even know I'm alive. You're so wrapped up in your damned old plastics business you don't have any room in your life for human beings." She was good and angry now, all the accumulated resentment of the last few years coming to a rolling boil. "You don't need me. You wouldn't even care if I got out of here and let you marry somebody else
you'd probably be glad. You aren't human."

"What I can't see is, what are you complaining about? Because I bailed you out, or because I don't make love to you as often as you might like, or what?"

"Well, you haven't been very friendly."

"Okay." Bill's face was flushed. He had put on weight in the last few months; his belly was beginning to round out under the white shirt, and he had the first sag of a double chin. His eyes were bloodshot, whether from overwork or alcohol, she couldn't tell. He had begun drinking, probably, before he came home. His own office was officially closed for the day but salesmen would have been in from out of town, and he might have made the rounds of other people's office parties before drifting in.

"Okay," he said again. "Come on upstairs, if you're so damn anxious to be noticed."

"Don't be silly."

"Come on."

She took a silver knife from the drawer and began to scratch at the burned baking sheet.

He seized her wrist. The knife clattered to the floor. "By God, I've taken a lot from you, but I'm not going to take any more. Come on upstairs, or I'll drag you up."

His hand was like steel. She tried to pull away. His grip tightened. "Upstairs," he said, and the quietness of his voice was a threat.

She followed him up the back stairs step by step, balking at each one, pulled along by the implacable band of fingers around her wrist.

He shut the bedroom door behind them before he let her go. Then he pulled down the shade, making dusk in the room, shutting out the cold winter light and the suddenly friendly, everyday view of street and houses. Frances stood warily by the wall, seeing the room where she had slept so many nights suddenly become an alien and frightening place, a prison.

She said coldly, "You're drunk."

"Not too drunk for what I'm going to do. You don't need to worry about that." He caught her by the shoulder as she edged toward the door. "Anyhow," he said, "you seem to like your friends that way."

He stripped off her clothes like a farmer husking corn, and threw her down on the bed so hard the springs rattled. She shut her eyes.

He was quick and violent, a stranger seeking fast relief, using her for his own need and unaware of her as a person. Like a man in a two-dollar whorehouse, she thought, despising the woman and in a hurry to get away. In almost no time he was done with her. He rolled over and sat on the edge of the bed, white in the cold half-light. A faint stale odor of alcohol hung around him.

She lay without moving or speaking, too miserable even to pull up the covers.

He got into his clothing quickly and efficiently, as though he were getting up to go to work. At the door he turned, looking uncertain for the first time. "Frances
"

She didn't answer.

She lay there for a long time after the downstairs door slammed. At last she began to shiver in the cold air. She drew the sheet up under her chin. Immediately, as though the motion had set her thoughts to wheeling, reality pressed in upon her. She lay looking at nothing, reliving the events of the last few hours. The pleasure of working in her clean light kitchen, a pleasure she had almost forgotten since she started going to business, intensified by the making of holiday cookies. I was almost happy, she thought in wonder. It seemed to her that she hadn't been happy for a long time.

The odd mixture of feelings that rippled the surface of her mind when Bob spoke of the girl, Mari. Quick admiration for one so young and in every way desirable, followed by the jealousy of a maturing woman for a young one and then by the fear of losing Bob to an early marriage. And the quick blazing up of her anger at Bill, held in check so long, like a fire that has smoldered for a long time and then, fanned by a sudden wind, shoots up to the sky. It had made her feel good to be angry, like having a clean sharp pain after months of a dull nagging infection.

Then, suddenly, the indignity of being dragged upstairs bodily by a man half drunk and used for the discharge of a passion that was more hate than love. She felt violated. She felt dirty, as though she would never be clean again. She lay with her hands outside the covers, as though her skin were unclean to the touch.

But this was nothing new. She had been through this before
the cringing sickness, the dull wish that she could shut her eyes on the whole confused mess and never open them again, the dragging fatigue. She lay slack-muscled, her hands lax against the bedspread, remembering.

CHAPTER 16

She had been too tired, the second night after her mother's death, to be capable of emotion. The sights and smells of a cancer patient's dying were incredible. She didn't blame her father for staying away and, when he did come home, taking the edge off his misery with drink. She came back from the graveyard to a house put in unaccustomed order by the neighbor women, a kitchen table loaded with offerings of food: ham, potato salad, cake, pie. After the weeks of unremitting work, there was suddenly nothing to do.

The afternoon was endless. She thought about writing to Miss Putnam
Miss Putnam had sent flowers and a note. But there was nothing to say. She was staying in this place she hated, taking over the drudgery, because there was nothing else to do. She accepted it. But the hurt was still too new and raw to admit of words.

She sat on the living room cot, her hands
callused, water-soaked, stubby-nailed
idle in her lap.

I can't go through with it.

You have to.

She must have dozed, for some time later she woke, startled and frightened. For a moment she thought she was back in the dorm, jerked awake by the clangor of Sondy's alarm clock. Then realization flooded in. She got up stiffly and walked to the window, aching in every muscle. The children were playing in the dusk, still in their new clothes. She called them in, gave them ham, cake, potato salad. She made coffee and sat at the kitchen table drinking it, too weary to swallow solid food.

Lorena said, "Pa went off someplace. I hate Pa."

"Never mind that. Wipe the crumbs off your face, then pick up these dishes for me
that's a good girl." Frankie smiled thinly. "I'll take care of Pa."