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Both Queenie and Mr. Vorguilla had to go out to work in the evenings. Mr. Vorguilla played the piano in a restaurant. He wore a tuxedo. And Queenie had a job selling tickets in a movie theater. The theater was just a few blocks away, so I walked there with her. And when I saw her sitting in the ticket booth I understood that the makeup and the dyed puffed hair and the hoop earrings were not so strange after all. Queenie looked like some of the girls passing on the street or going in to see the movie with their boyfriends. And she looked very much like some of the girls portrayed in the posters that surrounded her. She looked to be co
She looked-in my father’s words-as if she didn’t have to take a back seat to anybody.
“Why don’t you just wander around for a while?” she had said to me. But I felt conspicuous. I couldn’t imagine sitting in a cafe drinking coffee and advertising to the world that I had nothing to do and no place to go. Or going into a store and trying on clothes that I had no hope of buying. I climbed the hill again, I waved hello to the Greek woman calling out her window. I let myself in with Queenie’s key.
I sat on the cot on the sunporch. There was nowhere to hang up the clothes I had brought, and I thought it might not be such a good idea to unpack, anyway. Mr. Vorguilla might not like to see any sign that I was staying.
I thought that Mr. Vorguilla’s looks had changed, just as Queenie’s had. But his had not changed, as hers had, in the direction of what seemed to me a hard foreign glamour and sophistication. His hair, which had been reddish-gray, was now quite gray, and the expression of his face-always ready to flash with outrage at the possibility of disrespect or an inadequate performance or just at the fact of something in his house not being where it was supposed to be-seemed now to be one of more permanent grievance, as if some insult was being offered or bad behavior going unpunished all the time, in front of his eyes.
I got up and walked around the apartment. You can never get a good look at the places people live in while they are there.
The kitchen was the nicest room, though too dark. Queenie had ivy growing up around the window over the sink, and she had wooden spoons sticking up out of a pretty, handleless mug, just the way Mrs. Vorguilla used to have them. The living room had the piano in it, the same piano that had been in the other living room. There was one armchair and a bookshelf made with bricks and planks and a record player and a lot of records sitting on the floor. No television. No walnut rocking chairs or tapestry curtains. Not even the floor lamp with the Japanese scenes on its parchment shade. Yet all these things had been moved to Toronto, on a snowy day. I had been home at lunchtime and had seen the moving truck. Bet couldn’t keep away from the window in the front door. Finally she forgot all the dignity she usually liked to show to strangers and opened the door and yelled at the moving men. “You go back to Toronto and tell him if he ever shows his face around here again he ‘11 wish he hadn’t.”
The moving men waved cheerfully, as if they were used to scenes like this, and maybe they were. Moving furniture must expose you to a lot of ranting and raging.
But where had everything gone? Sold, I thought. It must have been sold. My father had said that it sounded as if Mr. Vorguilla was having a hard time getting going down in Toronto in his line of work. And Queenie had said something about “getting behind.” She would never have written to my father if they hadn’t gotten behind.
They must have sold the furniture before she wrote.
On the bookshelf I saw The Encyclopedia of Music, and The World Companion to Opera, and The Lives of the Great Composers. Also the large, thin book with the beautiful cover-the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám-that Mrs. Vorguilla often had beside her couch.
There was another book with a similarly decorated cover whose exact title I don’t remember. Something in the title made me think I might like it. The word “flowered” or “perfumed.” I opened it up, and I can remember well enough the first sentence I read.
“The young odalisques in the harim were also instructed in the exquisite use of their fingernails.”
I was not sure what an odalisque was, but the word “harim” (why not “harem”?) gave me a clue. And I had to read on, to find out what they were taught to do with their fingernails. I read on and on, maybe for an hour, and then let the book fall to the floor. I had feelings of excitement, and disgust, and disbelief. Was this the sort of thing that really grown-up people took an interest in? Even the design on the cover, the pretty vines all curved and twisted, seemed slightly hostile and corrupt. I picked the book up to put it back in its place and it fell open to show the names on the flyleaf. Stan and Marigold Vorguilla. In a feminine handwriting. Stan and Marigold.
I thought of Mrs. Vorguilla’s high white forehead and tight little gray-black curls. Her pearl-button earrings and blouses that tied with a bow at the neck. She was taller by quite a bit than Mr. Vorguilla and people thought that was why they did not go out together. But it was really because she got out of breath. She got out of breath walking upstairs, or hanging the clothes on the line. And finally she got out of breath even sitting at the table playing Scrabble.
At first my father would not let us take any money for fetching her groceries or hanging up her washing-he said it was only neighborly.
Bet said she thought she would try laying around and see if people would come and wait on her for nothing.
Then Mr. Vorguilla came over and negotiated for Queenie to go and work for them. Queenie wanted to go because she had failed her year at high school and didn’t want to repeat it. At last Bet said all right, but told her she was not to do any nursing.
“If he’s too cheap to hire a nurse that’s not your lookout.”
Queenie said that Mr. Vorguilla put out the pills every morning and gave Mrs. Vorguilla a sponge bath every evening. He even tried to wash her sheets in the bathtub, as if there was not such a thing as a washing machine in the house.
I thought of the times when we would be playing Scrabble in the kitchen and Mr. Vorguilla after drinking his glass of water would put a hand on Mrs. Vorguilla’s shoulder and sigh, as if he had come back from a long, wearying journey.
“Hello, pet,” he would say.
Mrs. Vorguilla would duck her head to give his hand a dry kiss.
“Hello, pet,” she would say.
Then he would look at us, at Queenie and me, as if our presence did not absolutely offend him. “Hello, you two.”
Later on Queenie and I would giggle in our beds in the dark. “Goodnight, pet.” “Goodnight, pet.” How much I wished that we could go back to that time.
Except for going to the bathroom in the morning and sneaking out to put my pad in the garbage pail, I sat on my made-up cot in the sunporch until Mr. Vorguilla was out of the house. I was afraid he might not have any place to go, but apparently he did. As soon as he was gone Queenie called to me. She had set out a peeled orange and cornflakes and coffee.
“And here’s the paper,” she said. “I was looking at the Help Wanteds. First, though, I want to do something with your hair. I want to cut some off the back and I want to do it up in rollers. Okay with you?”
I said okay. Even while I was eating, Queenie kept circling me and looking at me, trying to work out her idea. Then she got me up on a stool-I was still drinking my coffee-and she began to comb and snip.
“What kind of a job are we looking for, now?” she asked. “I saw one at a dry cleaner’s. At the counter. How would that be?”