The Story of a Marriage (11 page)

She was not beautiful. I decided that immediately as I saw her puckering her lips over the stiff red tip of the straw. But she had managed, with her sharp nose, her filbert-shaped face visibly freckled beneath the powder (flecks of vanilla in the cream), to create an illusion of beauty. A plain white girl who had learned to act as if she were pretty. The way she sat: mermaid-like, with her legs drawn up beneath her, and her voice modulated with a delicate ring that rose, now and then, into laughter the way my grandmother’s porch chime often broke into a wind-busied clangor. Her charm bracelet also rang, mostly with light, as its various hearts, books, and anchors caught the sun, and a single silver ring hung gleaming on her breast like an acrobat’s hoop. All the time, as she chatted with her friend, she drummed on her ziggurat of schoolbooks with a brush-tipped eraser.

“White with navy polka dots, and the top is navy with white polka dots.”

“Sounds lovely, doll.”

“I hope so, it cost a pretty penny.”

She was not what I’d thought she would be, nor what I’d hoped. I had imagined a cute, simpering airhead, not a bright girl desperate for something greater than life in our Sunset. Overhearing her conversation, I learned Annabel was studying chemistry at State in an astounding fantasy that a woman could be a scientist in 1953. That is what she talked about, as her friend tried to tempt her with sillier topics, as her straw went in and out of her Suicide: those chemistry classes, and the professors who ridiculed her, her disapproving father and the male students who pinched her. She talked about it all with humor, but the strain was already showing in the tired circles that her makeup could not hide.

“You won’t guess what they put in my lab notebook.”

“Oh, I don’t want to know.”

“Dirty pictures of course. Filthy, filthy pictures.”

“Annabel, what did you do?”

“Said it was hilarious, of course. What else could I do? You can’t let them know they’ve got you.”

A burst of birdlike laughter: a young married white couple across from Annabel, the bride very pregnant, the groom very dusty. They were clearly passing through; I could see their road-mangled car sleeping by the curb, bags tied to the top. Inside, a dog readjusted its position of longing. They had come far to escape the Nebraska of their license plate, and who knows what surefire plan they’d cooked up in Mexico or Alaska? Seeing them, I could not help but feel an American stab of hope.

From the booth, a familiar name.

The friend produced a waterfall of mirth: “Isn’t that rich?”

“Where did you hear that?” Annabel asked, looking around but not catching sight of me. “There’s nothing to it, I’m sure.”

“I thought you’d know all about it!” and more silvery laughter followed. “A married woman carrying on beneath her husband’s nose—”

“Hush, I’ve never even met his wife.” Annabel DeLawn turned to her dark cupcake and, picking at its pleated silver skirt with her nails, began to undress it on the table like a doll. William ran past me to get something from a back room.

Then her friend added, in a whisper: “A Negro, of all things.”

“I said hush.”

“And that husband of hers so gorgeous like a movie star.” Giggling: “Well you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Annabel?”

“Let’s change the topic.”

The silver foil of Annabel’s cake caught the light in a kind of fireworks, tossing blue sequins around the room. I thought I heard her sigh.

I felt the broken belt in my pocket and a brief, embarrassing fantasy occurred to me: at Playland again, following my husband and Annabel out to the Limbo ride—that tunnel of love—where they would board the hearse-shaped cars and enter, hands clasped, its great gaping mouth. Wildly, absurdly, I imagined I sat in the car behind them, listening to their whispers and echoed laughter. A scream—a giant spider above them. And then, all at once, the power would go out. Darkness, silence. Bird in the hand. I imagined a perfect crime: that of climbing from my car, pulling the belt from my pocket and slipping it around her neck. It felt, in the innocence of my daydream, like a passionate embrace; it was the struggle I had never had: that of never-letting-go, not for something that you want so much, not until the thing is done. Never-letting-go.

We should forgive ourselves the cruelty of our youth. I wasn’t that much older than Annabel, though I thought of myself as a grown-up married woman. I was young and in anguish, and she was young and struggling to make the best of her lot as a woman, and of the times she lived in. Glittering with charm and keeping that bitter smile as wide as she could. Surely she was as afraid as I was. And who knows what those rides with my husband meant, in truth—a husband casting about for options, finding it perhaps in this poor girl—and what Buzz’s jealousy, like an imp taking the form of our worst fears, had summoned.

From the booth: “Oh, Annabel, you tease. Tell me about him.”

“I won’t! I’m sure you know I’m promised to someone else!”

“But you’re not married yet.”

“Why should we? We’re keeping it secret, and I want to finish my studies first.”

“You’re a riot, Annabel, a regular riot!”

In irritation: “Gotta go, hon.”

Across from her, the bride gave out a gasp; from a tipped-over canister flowed the pink lava of a shake. William Platt ran from the back and grabbed a rag at the fountain.

Annabel passed a hand through her hair and the little charms on her bracelet tinkled like bells; the promise ring on her breastbone caught the light. Then, for a moment, I thought she saw me. Her body went straight and clean as a lighthouse, her eyes moving across the room, and her gaze seemed headed right for me. I felt that I might do it; I might talk to her. But her eyes moved over me and around the room until they settled on William, running by with his rag. He grinned and she smiled back, brightly, like a switch he had flicked on with his finger. Then with a bell she was through the door and gone, just a ghost haunting the window as she stopped outside to ask a policeman a question, her finger tracing the glowing French curve of her hair.

“’Scuse me folks.”

It was William, arriving with his bar rag, quickly wiping up the tabletop with the same circular caress I had seen him use to wash the family Ford, dotingly, soapily, on semi-sunny days. The pregnant girl held both hands up in a gesture of compliance, smiling, not as her husband smiled (with embarrassment) but with the pleasure some pregnant women have at being a bit of trouble to the world, and she watched the soda jerk as he cleaned. Around and around he went. And all the time his happy gaze was on the window, on Annabel. After a minute, she flashed her teeth at the helpful policeman and fled, her progress down the street reflected now only as a smirking glint in the cop’s girl-watching eye and a glowing one in William’s.

When he was done, handsome William (the basketball star) threw the rag into a distant bucket, wiped his hands on his apron, and, turning around and seeing my foam-ringed glass, picked up the empty thing—one finger of his right hand whitened by an absent ring—and looked right at me with the doomed sweet smile of a boy in love.

Buzz invited me to his office for our next meeting. We toured vast aviaries of chirping apparatuses, where workers lowered heavy patterns onto bolts of cloth and others fed huge blind cutting machines their daily feast of fabric. Buzz explained that during the war his father had altered the corset factory to sew parachutes for flares. “War is never what you think it will be,” he said, leading me across a high catwalk made of metal strips—like walking on the teeth of a comb—and when at last we had completed our circuit, he turned to me with his hands on his hips and grinned broadly. “That’s it!” he shouted. “What do you think?”

The machines entered a new round of gonging and Buzz shouted something else I could not hear. I shook my head and he repeated it.

“I’m selling it, I’m selling everything!” he shouted, grinning, then took a breath as if puzzled, perhaps hurt I had not divined his purpose. He had shown me his empire. The whirring menagerie his family had brought to life. He looked at me for a long moment, his lips slightly open, with the machines buzzing and clanging all around, waiting for me to understand.

“For you!” he exclaimed at last over the noise, his hands flying out before him.

We stood, facing each other, as the battle noise rose around us. Like allies in a fairy tale, each with half of a broken locket, now Buzz and I had shown each other the depths of our sacrifice, the treasures we were willing to surrender so they might fit together. Mine was a story of my youth, the home I had lost for my husband. And here was his: bright and oiled and twittering around me. Not just the brick aerodrome and the machines it enclosed, the precision instruments for making precision garments, but the family history he was willing to part with forever—no less than what I, myself, had relinquished. Buzz said it was for me, but that was not exactly true. It was for Holland.

A hundred thousand dollars, more or less. That was what the factory and the various businesses were worth. It was also the exact sum, in
Double Indemnity
, that Fred MacMurray told Barbara Stanwyck she could get if they killed her husband, did him in “straight down the line.” In 1953, it might as well have been a million.

We passed through a heavy door and, with a creak and a slam of relief, the din was silenced, replaced by the cricketing of well-oiled Singers attended by women in kerchiefs and overalls. One woman’s station was set with gleaming metal slivers, like the table of a knife thrower; apparently she was adding boning to the corsets. I said: “Reminds me of the first job I had in the war.”

“And what was that?”

“Wrapping fighter jets in paper.”

He laughed aloud. “That’s not a real job! That’s a job from the funnies.”

“That was really my job,” I said, feeling slightly defensive. “That’s why they brought us from Kentucky, the colored women, to wrap jets in paper. They needed the labor and we needed … don’t laugh.”

“I’m sorry.”

“They shipped them out to the Pacific, you’d think they’d fly them out, but they didn’t, and they wanted them all shiny and new for the boys. Four of us would climb up ladders with huge sheets of brown paper and we’d tape them together. Some girls would leave notes inside for the men to read, phone numbers.” Now it was my turn to laugh. “It was absurd. But it was better than welding steel, better on your eyes. I remember the welding girls all had to drink milk to purge the poisons from their systems.”

“But why wrap planes?” he asked again, baffled. “They were headed to war. Who cares how shiny the planes are?”

I said that war is never what you expect it to be.

Buzz laughed at that, then looked down on his workers in their droning underworld. The woman picked up her little knives, one by one, and slipped them in the pockets of a corset. That was when I told him I hadn’t confronted Annabel. Buzz grimaced in the half-light, and when he did that, I knew he had not come to me, that dark night, so I would “remove” Annabel for him. He hoped it would work, but he knew me; he’d watched me; he must have guessed I had no magic touch with girls like her, sipping Suicides in segregated shops. There was something more. What did he really want? Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it is unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can’t touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.

“We’ll find another way,” he said softly.

“I’m sorry. They were foolish gossips, those girls. Annabel and her friend.”

“It’s all right.”

I recited a line about those kind of girls, and it took Buzz a moment to realize I was quoting Holland’s favorite poet.

“You’re full of surprises, Pearlie Cook,” he told me.

“I hope I am.”

“Not too many, please.”

“She thinks we’re lovers, by the way,” I said suddenly. “You and me, it’s crazy. There’s some rumor going around the neighborhood—”

“I wouldn’t worry about that.”

“Well I don’t like being talked about.”

“They always talk about the wrong things, anyway. They never know what’s really going on.”

“I did overhear she’s promised to a young man.”

“Promised?”

“It’s what young people are doing. Before engagement, you’re promised.”

He seemed baffled, amused. “But engagement is the promise.”

“I can’t say I understand it. A vow, endlessly diluted.”

“Maybe it allows them to neck. People have some funny codes,” he shrugged. “Who’s the promised man?”

There was a clatter downstairs as a woman dropped her thread clippers and the floorwalker ran over to get her back in line. Buzz watched the women very carefully, then calmly asked me again.

I said the name. Bottles being set down on our front step every morning. That clear glass sound. A ring gleaming on her breastbone, and the wide smile on his face as she departed.

“William Platt, the Seltzer Boy,” he said. “How wholesome.” And I laughed. He took my arm and led me into a great loud room where they boxed up everything, and from there into a small, beautifully furnished parlor with a long mirror at one end and a folding screen at the other. Some soundproofing substance erased the screaming machines; you would never have known there was a factory outside that door. It felt like the house of a maiden aunt. From the center of the ceiling hung an incongruous lamp in the shape of a bird in flight. Buzz crossed the room and pressed a white porcelain button set into the wall.