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“Nothing,” I said. I tried to think when I’d last written to him. Surely not more than a week ago.
“I’ve been busy,” I said. “There’s been a lot to do around here.”
A few days before we had filled up the hopper with sawdust. That was what we burned in our furnace-it was the cheapest fuel you could buy. But when it was first loaded into the hopper it created clouds of very fine dust which settled everywhere, even on the bedclothes. And however you tried not to, you couldn’t help tracking it into the house on your shoes. It had taken a lot of sweeping and shaking to get rid of it.
“So I gathered,” he said-though I hadn’t yet written him anything about the sawdust problem. “Why are you doing all the work? Why don’t they get a housekeeper? Won’t they have to once you’re gone?”
“Fine,” I said. “I hope you like my dress. I told you Aunt Charlie was making my wedding dress?”
“Can you not talk?”
“Not really.”
“Well okay. Just write me.”
“I will. Today.”
“I’m painting the kitchen.”
He had been living in an attic room with a hot plate, but had recently found a one-bedroom apartment where we could begin our life together.
“Aren’t you even interested what color? I’ll tell you anyway.
Yellow with white woodwork. White cupboards. To get as much light in it as I can.”
“That sounds really nice,” I said.
When I hung up the phone my father said, “Not a lovers’ spat, I trust?” He spoke in an affected, teasing way just to break the silence in the room. Nevertheless I was embarrassed.
Again, a silence.
I knew what they thought about Michael. They thought he was too brightly smiling, too nicely shaved and shiny-shoed, too well brought up and heartily polite. Unlikely to have ever mucked out a stable or mended a fence. They had a habit of poor people-perhaps especially of poor people burdened with more intelligence than their status gets them credit for-a habit or necessity of turning their betters, or those whom they suspect of thinking themselves their betters, into such caricatures.
My mother was not like that. She approved of Michael. And he was polite to her, though uneasy around her, because of her thickened desperate speech and shaky limbs and the way her eyes might go out of control and roll upwards. He wasn’t used to sick people. Or poor people. But he had done his best, during a visit that must have seemed to him appalling, a dreary captivity.
From which he longed to rescue me.
These people at the table-except my mother-thought me to some extent a traitor for not staying where I belonged, in this life. Though they really didn’t want me to, either. They were relieved that someone would want me. Maybe sorry or a little ashamed that it was not one of the boys around home, yet understanding how that couldn’t be and this would be better for me, all round. They wanted to tease me sharply about Michael (they would have said it was only teasing), but on the whole, they were of the opinion that I should hang on to him.
I meant to hang on to him. I wished they could understand that he did have a sense of humor, he wasn’t as pompous as they thought, and that he was not afraid of work. Just as I wanted him to understand that my life here was not so sad or squalid as it seemed to him.
I meant to hang on to him and to my family as well. I thought that I would be bound up with them always, as long as I lived, and that he could not shame or argue me away from them.
And I thought I loved him. Love and marriage. That was a lighted and agreeable room you went into, where you were safe. The lovers I had imagined, the bold-plumed predators, had not appeared, perhaps did not exist, and I could hardly think myself a match for them anyway.
He deserved better than me, Michael did. He deserved a whole heart.
That afternoon, I went into town, as usual. The trunks were nearly full. My grandmother, free now of her phlebitis, was just finishing the embroidery on a pillow slip, one of a pair that she meant to add to my collection. Aunt Charlie was now devoting herself to my wedding dress. She had set up the sewing machine in the front half of the living room, which was divided by sliding oak doors from the back half where the trunks were. Dressmaking was the thing she knew about-my grandmother could never equal or interfere with her there.
I was to be married in a knee-length dress of burgundy velvet, with a gathered skirt and tight waist and what was called a sweetheart neckline, and puffed sleeves. I realize now that it looked homemade-not because of any fault in Aunt Charlie’s dressmaking but just because of the pattern, which was quite flattering in its way, but had an artlessness about it, a soft droop, a lack of assertive style. I was so used to homemade clothes as to be quite unaware of this.
After I had tried on the dress and was putting on my ordinary clothes again my grandmother called to us to come into the kitchen and have coffee. If she and Aunt Charlie had been by themselves they would have been drinking tea, but for my sake they had taken to buying Nescafe. It was Aunt Charlie who had started this, when my grandmother was in bed.
Aunt Charlie told me that she would join us in a moment-she was pulling out some basting.
While I was alone with my grandmother, I asked her how she had felt before her wedding.
“This is too strong,” she said, referring to the Nescafe, and she got to her feet with the dutiful slight grunt that now accompanied any sudden movement. She put on the kettle for more hot water. I thought she wasn’t going to answer me, but she said, “I don’t remember feeling any way at all. I remember not eating, because I had to get my waist down to fit in that dress. So I expect I was feeling hungry.”
“Didn’t you ever feel scared of-” I wanted to say of living your life with that one person. But before I could say anything more she answered briskly, “That business will sort itself out in time, never mind.”
She thought I was talking about sex, the one matter on which I believed I was in no need of instruction or reassurance.
And her tone suggested to me that perhaps there was something distasteful in my having brought the subject up and that she had no intention of providing any fuller answer.
Aunt Charlie’s joining us as she did at that moment would have made further comment unlikely anyway.
“I am still concerned about the sleeves,” Aunt Charlie said. “I’m wondering should I shorten them a quarter of an inch?”
After she had her coffee she went back and did so, basting just one sleeve to see how it would look. She called me to come and try the dress on again and when I had done so she surprised me, looking intently into my face instead of at my arm. She had something in her fist, that she was wanting to give to me. I put out my hand and she whispered, “Here.”
Four fifty-dollar bills.
“If you change your mind,” she said, still in a shaky urgent whisper. “If you don’t want to get married, you’ll need some money to get away.”
When she’d said change your mind, I had thought she was teasing me, but when she got to you’ll need some money, I knew she was in earnest. I stood transfixed in my velvet dress, with an ache in my temples, as if I had got a mouthful of something far too cold or too sweet.
Aunt Charlie’s eyes had gone pale with alarm at what she’d just said. And at what she still had to say, with more emphasis, though her lips were trembling.
“It might not be just the right ticket for you.”
I had never heard her use the word ticket in that way before-it seemed as if she was trying to speak the way a younger woman would. The way she thought I would, but not to her.