USUALLY MARGY READ coming home in the trolley. But tonight her library book lay unopened in her lap. She was thinking out some way in which she could ask her mother to let her keep enough of her pay to buy a new winter coat. She couldn’t figure out any way except to ask outright. She cringed from that. In order to forget the matter for the time being, she concentrated on examining her fellow-passengers, a favorite game with her.
Most of them were working people. The young girls like Margy read library books or magazines and the older women did endless tortuous tatting or intricate cotton crochet work—small needlework that fitted into a purse. The young men, newspapers folded expertly into a narrow oblong, read with intense interest the dope on the Brooklyn ball team’s chance for next season.
The older men, wearing work pants so stiff and shiny at the knees that they looked oiled, sat dumbly relaxed with gnarled hands resting bluntly on knees. It was as though the hands refused to give up the curve used in the manual work they had done that day; were enchanted; had frozen in the essential curve to fit their work and would stay that way in readiness for the next day’s handling of tools or levers or heavy crates. They sat there, their eyes dull and filmed with weariness. They were worn out, beaten down. They had to conserve themselves each nonworking moment in order to replenish their strength for the next day’s work. And their killing work brought them nothing except enough rest and food to enable them to work. Time did not march on with them; it went around in a circle. They lived on memories of the hopes they had had as young men and on some lucky break in the future that would release them from a hard life. For the moment, nothing mattered to them except the throbbing feeling of rest.
As the car bumped through Williamsburg toward Greenpoint, workers got off at various corners. A new kind of passenger replaced them—middle-aged housewives who had been visiting friends or married daughters in other neighborhoods, and who now were belatedly getting home to prepare supper.
They stood on corners, blocks ahead of the coming car, and as it drew near stepped out to the curb and signaled worriedly as though afraid the car would not stop for them; afraid it would pass them by and they’d be left stranded in an alien neighborhood with night coming on.
They mounted the car steps with grateful eagerness and teetered unsteadily to a seat. Then while they fumbled in their broken-strapped purses for a nickel for fare, they looked up to smile ingratiatingly at the conductor as if apologizing for making him wait.
They wore black—bunchy dress and sagging coat; a slightly mashed, too youthful hat, probably a daughter’s discard, set straight on their heads. They sat spread out and breathing heavily, looking like pumpkins squatting on the ground in late fall ready to squash apart if a wintry wind went among them.
Yet each had been a tremulous young girl once, full of dreams and natural vanities. But they had had to fight poverty and they were licked from the start. The lost fight had taken full payment from them.
Watching them, Margy thought: I’ll never get like that. I’ll be more like Mama. She’s nearly forty and slender as any girl. But I guess she’s so thin because she always looks at the sad side of life. But I won’t be sad and I won’t be fat either. I’ll stay just the way I am. I won’t let myself go to pieces no matter what kind of a life I have. Thus Margy.
SHE STOPPED IN at Alexander’s before she went home. She ordered a two-cent soda. The man poured an inch of chocolate syrup into a glass, filled it with seltzer water to the top and gave it three professional digs with a long spoon to mix it. He replaced the spoon in its long glass of water. He watched her drink it, knuckles resting on white-aproned hips, waiting for her verdict.
“Good!” she approved. He nodded, satisfied. He relaxed. She bought three penny chocolate twists, the kind with hard crackling marshmallow inside.
“You’ll spoil your supper, Margy,” he warned.
“I’m buying these for after,” she explained.
Then it happened—the hoped-for event that made her stop by the store each night. Frankie Malone came in. She turned her back and pretended to be absorbed in the magazines on the rack.
“Let’s have a pack of Fatimas,” he ordered. She heard a coin ring on the glass showcase. She turned around in simulated surprise.
“I thought it was you,” she said.
“What do you know? Well, what do you say, Marge?”
“I’m spoiling my supper with soda and candy.” As she said it, she realized how banal it sounded and was filled with despair. Always she planned to say something bright and interesting when she met him, and always she said something inane.
“That’s a lot of hoo-ey. Nothing can spoil a meal if you’re hungry.”
“That’s right.”
They stood and talked. They said nothing of importance, nothing of interest. They were held at the soda fountain by an unexpressed but common bond. Both dreaded the plunge into turbulent family life after an orderly day at the office; each tried to delay the inevitable home-coming by conversation. But they ran out of talk soon enough. Frankie, feeling obligated to round out the meeting correctly, mentioned that the Neighborhood Center House was starting up its monthly dances that night.
“Would you like to go . . .”
“Yes!” she jumped in too eagerly.
“. . . to the one next month?” Her eyes had come so quickly that he had had no time to rearrange the last words of his sentence. He felt like a heel. “I’d take you tonight, only . . .”
“I know,” she said, anxious to make amends for her eagerness. “A previous engagement . . .”
“Nothing important.” He didn’t know why he had to say that except it seemed the correct ritual when talking to a girl about another date. “Only I made the date some time ago and I like to keep promises. I’m funny that way.”
“That’s a good way to be,” she said.
“A month from tonight, then?”
“Thanks. I’d love to.”
“It’s a date?” he verified.
“A date,” she agreed.
Walking away from the store he thought: Why did I have to go and stick my neck out? I don’t want to take her. She’s not much fun. I’ll have to get out of it some way.
She ran up the steps in a glow. Her first date! But it was twenty-eight days off. She wondered how she could wait that long. She prayed that he wouldn’t change his mind. She was jealous of the girl he was taking that night. Already the unknown girl was a serious rival. She decided that her mother would just have to buy her a new coat—at least a new dress. She’d just have to.
Just before she opened the door, she smelled onions frying and heard fat sizzling in the pan. Same old supper. She sighed, glad that she had had the soda to take the edge off her appetite.
“Hello, Mom.” Flo’s return greeting was a sharp sigh. As her mother set a plate on the table, Margy asked with her father’s inflection, “You eat yet?”
“Long ago,” said Flo.
“Keep mine hot, then, till Papa comes home. I don’t like to eat alone.”
“God knows when your father will be home. It might be all hours,” predicted Flo mournfully. “That’s why I never wait for him.”
Henny always got home between six and six-thirty but his wife had this fixed idea that he was an unpunctual man.
“Still and all, I guess I’ll wait,” said Margy. “I don’t care much for fried eggs, anyhow.” It was a most unfortunate remark.
“Considering,” said Flo bridling, “the little money that comes in this house . . .” Margy couldn’t bear to have the inevitable nightly argument about food and money.
“What I started to say,” Margy amended hastily, “is, that I don’t care much for fried eggs without onions. Are there onions?” she asked.
“Of course,” reproached her mother. “I might not have much money to cook with, but . . .”
“I changed my mind,” broke in Margy. “I won’t wait for Papa. I’m too hungry.”
On the way to the sink to wash her hands, Margy flung her arm about her mother’s waist and hugged her briefly. Through the tilted mirror over the sink, she saw her mother’s mouth go crooked in a tremulous smile.
Poor Mama, she thought. Poor Mama. What goes wrong with people that they feel they have to put on a mean act all the time like Mama does?
Margy answered her own question. I guess she must have had a hard life. And still has.