HENNY CAME IN as Margy started to eat. Again there was the hurried lighting of the gas flame, the thump of the lump of lard, the cubes of cold boiled potato splashing into the melting grease, the prickling smell of the browning onion rings and the crisp crack of eggs broken against the pan’s rim. These were the symphony of home—family sounds carried over from Margy’s babyhood.
“You’re late,” announced Flo briefly and bitterly.
Margy felt she’d scream if he’d tell about the motorman’s not stopping and if he didn’t tell about it, she’d scream too because it would be like the end of his life had come.
“Had a little argument with the motorman,” explained Henny. “He didn’t feel like stopping at Maujer Street to let me out. So I looked him up and down and said in a polite, quiet way, ‘Listen, Mac!’”
He went on relating the incident as though it had happened for the first time that evening. As he sat down and reached for the ketchup bottle, he asked his wife the old familiar question. Margy forestalled Flo’s bitter answer.
“Sure, Pop. Mama ate. But don’t you think it’s cute to eat with me?” she asked with aching archness.
She put her hand on his left wrist. His right hand with its stiff workman’s curve closed laboriously over her hand for an instant and then he withdrew it in embarrassment.
“Remember,” Henny reminisced, as he started to eat, “how you used to sit by the washtubs and play with clothespins and make out like they was dolls?”
“Yes,” sighed Margy. “I sure was a dumb kid.”
“Dumb!” exclaimed Flo indignantly—Flo to whom the past was perfect. “You was the smartest child on the block. Yes, you was. And good, too. I never had to raise my hand to you.”
“Except in self-defense,” said Margy, meaning to get a smile out of her mother.
“What? How?” Flo didn’t get the joke. “No. I never hit you.”
Vividly, as though it had been yesterday, Margy remembered her mother slapping the ice cream sandwich out of her hand into the gutter. “Remember the time I got lost?” she asked.
“You never got lost.” Flo refused to remember that time.
“All children get lost,” stated Henny.
“Not her. I guess I’d remember if she ever got lost,” said Flo.
“Well, maybe I just strayed a little,” said Margy. She smiled at her father. He smiled back. She directed her smile at her mother. The woman resisted but Margy held the smile. At last Flo’s face broke up like a jigsaw puzzle that would have to be reworked. She smiled.
There was a kind of peace and good will in the little flat for a while. But it couldn’t last of course. Margy hoped her father would stay home that evening. She was tired of the nightly quarrel that began when he made the first move to go out. He got up from the table and went over to the door to get his coat.
“Going out?” asked Flo.
“Yeah.”
“Again?” No answer. She took his silence for hostility. “You couldn’t stay home even one night?” she asked with what seemed like sweet reasonableness. He seemed to consider the question.
“No,” he decided.
“Why?”
He knew why, but he didn’t have the right words to explain so she’d understand. He found some lame words.
“Because there’s nothing here, home. And after a man works hard all day . . .”
“And after a woman works hard all day,” countered Flo, “she don’t want to be cooped up nights, neither. At least you see other people in the shop all day. I don’t see nobody. All day I look at the four walls . . .”
On the pretext of washing her hands, Margy let the water run noisily into the sink. As she turned her soaped hands one over the other in slow, tight, agonized movements, she listened to the water and tried to make it shut out the well-worn and familiar-since-childhood words of accusation and bitterness. But the voices rose higher and cut through the sound of the running water.
“I might as well be married to that door,” said Flo.
“Well, do you want to go out with me?” invited Henny drearily.
“Out where?”
“Just out.”
“To one of your beer parlors?”
“No. Just out,” he persisted vaguely.
“There’s no place to go and you know it,” she stated flatly.
“There’s places.”
“Where? Just tell me where. Tell me one place.”
“I don’t know,” he conceded futilely.
“If my mother, God rest her soul, was living, I’d have a place to go. I can tell you that.”
But on the cue, “mother,” he had the door open and was on his way downstairs.
Margy dried her hands slowly. “I suppose you’re going out, too,” said Flo.
“No, Mama.” Margy had been planning to go to the library to exchange her book. But she said, “No, Mama.”
“I’m surprised. I guess you’re staying home because you got no place to go.”
Margy began moaning inwardly. “I could find some place to go, I guess,” she said.
“Hah!” called out Flo triumphantly. “Then you’re only staying home because you feel sorry for me; because your father leaves me sit every night.”
Margy knew that her mother wanted them to stay home to prove that they loved her and wanted to be near her. Flo wanted this, but she didn’t know how to deserve it.
“I’m staying home because I have a lot to do.”
“What?”
“I got to rinse out my slip for one thing. I should wash my hair but I guess I’ll only put it up. Oh, I have a lot of things to do.” She sighed convincingly.
As she hung up the towel, she looked in the mirror and saw her mother’s unguarded face. Flo looked almost happy. Margy knew that she, Margy, had lost out again. She felt she had a right to go out after working all day. Then she thought of how little her mother had out of life. She reasoned that if staying home made her mother happy, it was the least she could do. After all, thought Margy, she has nothing and I have my whole life before me.
That was Margy’s whole philosophy, her golden hope—that she had all of life before her.
She undressed and got into her bathrobe made of an imitation Navaho blanket. She washed her slip, stockings, brassière and step-ins. She wound dampened ends of her hair up on aluminum curlers. She filed her nails and though the polish was unchipped, she removed it and put on fresh lacquer. Then she ironed her damp flimsy lingerie into dryness. She took as long as she could with everything, but at eight-thirty she was finished. She wasn’t sleepy enough for bed. Besides the day seemed incomplete, as though there was something more that had to happen.
She went into the parlor and switched on the light. The room was both familiar and strange—familiar because it had always been there and strange because it was used so little. Like the other rooms of the flat, it was barrenly clean. The lace curtains were coldly starched and the familiar shiny-leaved rubber plant stood on a taboret between the two front windows. The dull, brown velours, overstuffed davenport with two matching armchairs stood at familiar angles, and the looming, dully polished victrola stood catty cornered in its familiar place.
That victrola! It had been the only luxury of their lives; bought on time, a dollar a week, twelve records free. Margy remembered the happiness of getting it all paid up and really owning it. But the handle had snapped in two one night. Henny had taken it to be repaired but had waited too long to call for it. The repairman couldn’t find it; denied it had ever been brought to his basement shop. His denials had been so passionate that he almost got Henny to believing there never had been a handle in the first place. To replace that handle was just something that the Shannons couldn’t accomplish.
The machine had stood silent for years, a symbol of the futility of their days. The lost handle was proof to Henny of his constant contention that he was always being pushed around and it was another strike against him as far as his wife was concerned. She had gloated over his negligence the way a philatelist gloats over a rare, newly acquired stamp. It had been another link in the chain of recrimination that she was everlastingly forging against her husband. A queer thing that a lost handle could become so much a part of the stuff that formed a family’s life.
Margy put the “Missouri Waltz” on the turntable. She knew it couldn’t play without being wound yet she had an unreasonable hope that some miracle would make the music come. In a small frenzy of desperation she stuck her little finger in the handle hole and tried to turn over the machinery with her fingernail. Then she began turning the record with her hand. A phrase of music came grudgingly. She twirled the record faster. The music came limpingly and incomplete. She hummed along with it, trying to make it a whole thing. Suddenly she stopped. She had not heard her mother come in but she knew Flo was standing behind her. She waited for the first words.
“You’d think we was made out of money,” began Flo.
“I’ve only had the light on for a minute.”
“Light in the kitchen! Light in the front room! House lit up like a Christmas tree!” Margy turned off the light. Her mother’s voice continued from the darkness. “It’s not that I’m stingy but we have to watch every penny.”
“I know.”
“If I had my way I’d have a light in every room. But how would we make ends meet then? I’d just like to show you last month’s electric bill.”
“You don’t have to, Mama. I know.”
Back in the kitchen, Margy tried to get absorbed in her book but Flo couldn’t bear to be shut out. She kept still as long as she could, then spoke out.
“Do you think I like it?” Margy looked up, confused, trying to make the transition from Iris March of The Green Hat to the Maujer Street flat. “No, I don’t like it,” continued Flo. “Scrounging, living this way.” She sighed. “What big ideas I used to have! I pictured myself dressed to kill—my daughter in fine clothes.”
“Mama, I need a new winter coat,” said Margy, suddenly.
“Can’t afford it,” came the automatic answer. “Your old coat over the suit will do another winter.”
“I’m past eighteen now and . . .”
“Eighteen? Why it was only yesterday you was a baby.” Then a look of naked fright came on the woman’s face. She wondered what Margy was leading up to. Was there a man? Was she planning marriage? “Why did you just say you was eighteen?”
“Because I am eighteen.”
“Everybody’s eighteen sometime in their life.”
“Well, Reenie’s been paying board since the day she was eighteen.”
“That girl’s a bad influence—the way she dresses. The less you got to do with her, the better off you’ll be.”
“Reenie gives her mother five dollars a week. But I’d give you seven.”
“What are you talking about?”
Margy blurted it out. “I want to pay board home instead of giving in all my pay. That way I could get a new coat and a new dress once in a while.”
“What for?”
“Well, I’m invited to a dance and I’d like a new dress. That’s why I thought . . .”
Flo seemed to consider her daughter’s request. “All right,” she said finally. She spoke quietly and reasonably. “Pay board, then. Yes, pay board. Deal out seven one-dollar bills on the table every Saturday. But if you lose your job, your board stops and you can go find a free boarding house. If you get sick while you’re boarding here, nursing is extra.”
“Don’t start carrying on, Mama. All I’m asking is a few dollars a week out of my pay.”
“Yes, pay board,” droned on Flo unheedingly. Suddenly her tears came. “When my own mother, God rest her soul, was living, I was so happy to help her. I gave her all my pay and wished I could give her more. I used to carry her around in my hands. I just couldn’t do enough for her.” She began to sob.
Margy was sorry, sorry, sorry that she had started anything. She should have known she couldn’t win. Now she had the added trouble of trying to undo the whole thing.
“All right, Mama, I won’t pay board then. I thought there was no harm in asking. I’ll keep on bringing home all my money. Only don’t cry.”
After Flo had permitted herself to be persuaded to dry her tears, she felt that she had to explain her attitude. “It’s not that I’m mean,” she said. “There’s not a kinder person in the whole world than me. If I had plenty the best would be none too good for you. But you got no idea how hard it is to keep a home together on so little.”
“I said all right, Mama.”
“You got your whole life before you. You’ll have many a good day yet. My good days are all behind me. When a woman gets my age what has she got to look forward to? Nothing. Only her children. And it’s a sad thing when children turn on a mother.”
“I’m not turning on you.”
“It’s a wonder,” continued Flo, “that I do so good considering the little money comes in this house. And do I get credit? No! Do I get a salary for my work like you and your father? No!” She addressed an imaginary companion. “My daughter thinks she gives me too much. My daughter thinks I spend all the money on myself.”
Margy took off her bathrobe. “Mama, if you don’t stop, I’m going out.”
“A dance!” said Flo quickly. “You said you wanted a dress for a dance. What dance? Who you going with?”
“Nobody. Nothing,” said Margy. “I was just talking.”
Just then a boy came to the door with a message that she was wanted on Alexander’s phone. Glad of an excuse to get out of the house for a few minutes, Margy threw on her dress and coat and followed the boy.
“HELLO?”
“This you, Margy?”
“Who else?”
“Well, you sound funny over the phone.”
“You always say that, Reenie. Well, what’s up?”
“Listen! I thought I’d ask you. I’m thinking of changing.”
“On account of Sal?”
“Yeah. It would be hard on the children—if we got married, I mean.” Reenie thought of what her mother had said. “There’d be hard feelings on his side if they went to my church and I’d get mad if they went to his.”
“Well, if you love him, you might as well take his religion.”
“You’re not saying that just because you’re Catholic, yourself?”
“I don’t know. You asked me and I told you.”
“There’s only one thing bothers me: The idea of going to confession and telling all the bad things you thought and did out loud to a stranger.”
“Oh, I guess a priest who has to hear a couple of hundred confessions a week won’t be knocked off his feet by your sins.”
“I don’t like to be bawled out.”
“They don’t . . . I mean, I don’t know how it is in other Catholic churches, but in my church, he just listens and when you’re through, he tells you to say so and so many Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s for penance.”
“So you just don’t sit in a box with him and talk it out and listen to a lot of advice?”
“Not in the church I go to.”
“Well,” concluded Reenie, “I’ll think it over some more.”
“Listen, Reenie, I’m going to a dance.”
“Swell! Who’s the guy?”
“Oh, just some fellow I’ve known for quite some time.”
“You never told me.”
“There’s nothing to tell. He’s just a fellow.”
“But I tell you everything.”
“I’ll tell you all about the dance afterwards.”
“Do that.”
They waited, the wires hummed. There seemed to be nothing more to say.
“Well,” said both simultaneously and laughed.
“Will I see you at the office tomorrow?” asked Margy with sudden unexplained anxiety.
“Why not?”
“Well, I just thought . . . Okay. See you tomorrow, then.”
The boy was waiting outside the telephone booth. “Pick out what you want,” Margy told him. He chose a strip of licorice. Margy paid Alexander the penny. That was the kid’s reward for fetching her. He hung around the store all evening, calling people to the phone at a penny a call.
“WHO PHONED?” ASKED FLO.
“A girl from the office. She won’t be in tomorrow and she asked me to tell the supervisor.”
Margy told the lie simply because if she had said Reenie phoned, she’d have to listen to a diatribe against her friend for the rest of the evening.
IT WAS TEN o’clock and quiet in the house. Flo was making regular trips to the parlor to peer out the window to see if Henny was coming home. Margy found she was hungry. She got out one of the penny bars of candy and started nibbling on it while she read.
“Don’t spoil your stomach with that trash,” said Flo, “I’ll make you a nice sandwich.” Obediently, Margy set the candy aside.
Flo took special pains with the sandwich. When it was finished she put a paper doily on the plate under it. Wordlessly and rather shyly, she pushed the plate along the table to Margy.
The girl looked at it and her eyes blurred with tears. Flo had extravagantly trimmed off the crusts because Margy liked sandwiches that way. And the extra touch of the lace paper doily! She looked up and smiled. Flo turned her face away from the eyes that looked so bright with tears.
“Would you like a cup of coffee, too?” Flo asked humbly.
“No, Mama. The sandwich is wonderful. The best fried-egg sandwich I ever had. Thank you. Thank you a whole lot, Mama.”
Flo’s heart turned over. She thought: She asks for a new winter coat and all she gets is a sandwich and she says thanks—for that. She gives in too easy. She ought to have more fight in her. It’s all right for her to give in to me. But suppose some man gets hold of her and she gives in so easy? Or she might marry somebody just because she feels sorry for him and she’ll never complain if he’s mean to her. I’m so scared that she’ll always get the dirty end of the stick. She’s too much like her father—don’t know how to stand up for her own rights.
Margy’s thoughts ran along the same line. I wish I was more like Mama so I could get my own way in some things. Nothing big—just things like getting a new winter coat or a new dress. But I can’t fight. I get sick when I argue. Oh, well, this is only temporary. Everything will be better someday. I’ll make it better. After all, I’m young yet.
Her mother spoke aloud. “You’re young yet, Margy. After all, you have your whole life before you.”
“Yes,” Margy said. “Yes.”
Each went back to her thoughts. Flo thought: I must do better by her otherwise I’ll lose her because she’ll marry the first man that comes along. And she’s such a good girl.
Margy thought: I understand sometimes why she’s the way she is. I wish she’d try to understand me. I try my best to see how it is with her—and with other people, too. All I wish is that someday someone will come along and try to see how it is with me.