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I said, “That’d be fine.”
“Are you still pla
I said I didn’t know. I had an idea that she might think that a drab sort of occupation.
“I think you should be. You’re smart enough. Teachers get paid more. They get paid more than people like me. You’ve got more independence.”
But it was all right, she said, working at the movie theater. She had got the job a month or so before last Christmas, and she was really happy then because she had her own money at last and could buy the ingredients for a Christmas cake. And she became friends with a man who was selling Christmas trees off the back of a truck. He let her have one for fifty cents, and she hauled it up the hill herself. She hung streamers of red and green crepe paper, which was cheap. She made some ornaments out of silver foil on cardboard and bought others on the day before Christmas when they went on sale in the drugstore. She made cookies and hung them on the tree as she had seen in a magazine. It was a European custom.
She wanted to have a party, but she didn’t know who to ask. There were the Greek people, and Stan had a couple of friends. Then she got the idea of asking his students.
I still couldn’t get used to her saying “Stan.” It wasn’t just the reminder of her intimacy with Mr. Vorguilla. It was that, of course. But it was also the feeling it gave, that she had made him up from scratch. A new person. Stan. As if there had never been a Mr. Vorguilla that we had known together-let alone a Mrs. Vorguilla-in the first place.
Stan’s students were all adults now-he really preferred adults to schoolchildren-so they didn’t have to worry about the sort of games and entertainment you plan for children. They held the party on a Sunday evening, because all the other evenings were taken up with Stan’s work at the restaurant and Queenie’s at the theater.
The Greeks brought wine they had made and some of the students brought eggnog mix and rum and sherry. And some brought records you could dance to. They had thought that Stan wouldn’t have any records of that kind of music, and they were right.
Queenie made sausage rolls and gingerbread and the Greek woman brought her own kind of cookies. Everything was good. The party was a success. Queenie danced with a Chinese boy named Andrew, who had brought a record she loved.
“Turn, turn, turn,” she said, and I moved my head as directed. She laughed and said, “No, no, I didn’t mean you. That’s the record. That’s the song. It’s by the Byrds.”
“Turn, turn, turn,” she sang. “To everything, there is a season-”
Andrew was a dentistry student. But he wanted to learn to play the Moonlight Sonata. Stan said that was going to take him a long time. Andrew was patient. He told Queenie that he could not afford to go home to Northern Ontario for Christmas.
“I thought he was from China,” I said.
“No, not Chinese Chinese. From here.”
They did play one children’s game. They played musical chairs. Everybody was boisterous by that time. Even Stan. He pulled Queenie down into his lap when she was ru
“You know the way men are,” Queenie said. “Do you have a boyfriend yet, or anything?”
I said no. The last man my father had hired as a driver was always coming to the house to deliver some unimportant message, and my father said, “He just wants a chance to talk to Chrissy.” I was cool to him, however, and so far he hadn’t got up the nerve to ask me out.
“So you don’t really know about that stuff yet?” said Queenie.
I said, “Sure I do.”
“Hmm hmm,” she said.
The guests at the party had eaten up nearly everything but the cake. They did not eat much of that, but Queenie wasn’t offended. It was very rich, and by the time they got to it they were filled up with sausage rolls and other things. Also, it had not had time to ripen the way the book said it should, so she was just as glad to have some left over. She was thinking, before Stan pulled her away, that she should get the cake wrapped up in a wine-soaked cloth and put it in a cool place. She was either thinking of doing that or she was actually doing it, and in the morning she saw that the cake was not on the table, so she thought she had done it. She thought, Good, the cake was put away.
A day or so later Stan said, “Let’s have a piece of that cake.” She said, Oh, let it ripen a bit more, but he insisted. She went to the cupboard and then to the refrigerator, but it was not there. She looked high and low and she could not find it. She thought back to seeing it on the table. And a memory came to her, of getting a clean cloth and soaking it in wine and wrapping it carefully around the leftover cake. And then of wrapping waxed paper around the outside of the cloth. But when had she done that? Had she done it at all or only dreamed about it? Where had she put the cake when she finished wrapping it? She tried to see herself putting it away, but her mind went blank.
She looked all through the cupboard, but she knew the cake was too big to be hidden there. Then she looked in the oven and even in insane places like her dresser drawers and under the bed and on the closet shelf. It was nowhere.
“If you put it somewhere, then it must be somewhere,” Stan said.
“I did. I put it somewhere,” said Queenie.
“Maybe you were drunk and you threw it out,” he said.
She said, “I wasn’t drunk. I didn’t throw it out.”
But she went and looked in the garbage. No.
He sat at the table watching her. If you put it somewhere it must be somewhere. She was getting frantic.
“Are you sure?” said Stan. “Are you sure you didn’t just give it away?
She was sure. She was sure she hadn’t given it away. She had wrapped it up to keep. She was sure, she was almost sure she had wrapped it to keep. She was sure she had not given it away.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Stan said. “I think maybe you gave it away. And I think I know who to.”
Queenie was brought to a standstill. Who to?
“I think you gave it to Andrew.”
To Andrew?
Oh, yes. Poor Andrew, who was telling her he couldn’t afford to go home for Christmas. She was sorry for Andrew.
“So you gave him our cake.”
No, said Queenie. Why would she do that? She would not do that. She had never thought of giving Andrew the cake.
Stan said, “Lena. Don’t lie.”
That was the begi
“Probably you were drunk,” Stan said. “You were drunk and you are not remembering very well.”
Queenie said she was not drunk.
“You were the one who was drunk,” she said.
He got up and came at her with his hand raised, saying not to tell him that he ‘d been drunk, never to tell him that.
Queenie cried out, “I won’t. I won’t. I’m sorry.” And he didn’t hit her. But she began to cry. She kept crying while she tried to persuade him. Why would she give away the cake she had worked so hard to make? Why would he not believe her? Why would she lie to him?
“Everybody lies,” Stan said. And the more she cried and begged him to believe her, the more cool and sarcastic he became.
“Use a little logic. If it’s here, get up and find it. If it isn’t here, then you gave it away.”
Queenie said that wasn’t logic. It did not have to be given away just because she could not find it. Then he came close to her again in such a calm, half-smiling way that she thought for a moment he was going to kiss her. Instead he closed his hands around her throat and just for a second cut off her breath. He didn’t even leave any marks.
“Now,” he said. “Now-are you going to teach me about logic?”