Chapter Twenty-eight

I extracted a straw, inserted it carefully between the floating lumps of vanilla ice cream and deep into the soda. I took a deep draw of the concoction and then caught a look at myself in the soda fountain’s mirror. Foolish, girlish, I gave myself a pinup girl wink and took another sip. I’d had my hair cut, and it fanned my face in effortless curls. Unlike so many others, I never had to submit to the heat and stench of a permanent. My fair hair was always curly enough to avoid chemical interference and responsive enough to obey ordinary rollers and bobby pins. Maybelline carmine red banded the straw where my lips pressed. My indulgence. My vanity. Hair done and lips painted, I could have been any wife going home to a husband who would appreciate that she was taking care of herself. For all the good it did me.

This was luxury. An hour without guilt because Keller would give Rick his lunch and then bring out the chess set. Miraculously, he had managed to get Rick to play the game with him, when all other attempts at the distraction of cribbage or poker or rummy had failed. Maybe because it was something easily played one-handed.

In any event, Keller’s presence had given me the opportunity of an afternoon to myself. If I’d had any friends, I’d have gone visiting or talked one of them into going out to lunch. Living as we did, in near isolation in a town where we knew no one, hadn’t bothered me at first. But once Keller was there and I was allowed some guiltless free time, I began to miss the easy companionship of the other baseball wives. But it had been too long, a lot of the players had changed, and the truth was, I didn’t live that life anymore. I didn’t want to gossip about who might be traded, or whose wife was pregnant. Especially who was pregnant.

I might have called on Clarissa, Sid’s wife, but to be honest, I hadn’t taken to Clarissa. She was nice enough, but I didn’t have the urge to pull her into my confidences. He’d married a Boston Brahmin Vassar girl and I wasn’t her kettle of fish, either. We smiled at each other at our occasional family dinners, but we’d never be the kind of friends who chatted for hours on the phone.

I wrote often to my high school pal Gertie, now Mrs. Donald Richmond, proud doyenne of five hundred acres six miles beyond Mount Joy’s town limits and mother to three little boys. Gertie’s life was full of farm talk—crops, cows, and corn prices—and kids. I had nothing to offer but medical updates. I had half a dozen stock sentences and I alternated them so that it didn’t look like I was writing the same letter over and over: Rick is doing well this week. We had a good visit with the VA docs. We had a little setback with his catheter, but all is well now. The leaves are turning beautifully. We’ve had three big snowstorms in the past two weeks. The summer is proving to be rainy. Blah, blah, blah. Life’s just peachy.

My erstwhile boyfriend Buster Novak had been killed in action in the Pacific. I confess that sometimes I wondered what it might have been like had I accepted him. After all, my life hadn’t turned out a whole lot different from that of farmwife. My daily concerns, with the exception of corn prices, pretty much came to the same thing as any farm wife dealt with: feeding my men, keeping the household running, looking out for the windstorms that blew through my existence every time Rick succumbed to a depression that never quite lifted. The adventure and culture and excitement were long gone, subsumed by the daily struggle to survive.

When Keller appeared with Pax, that gave me something interesting to tell Gertie. “Rick is really happy to have Pax back. Nicholson is such a big help. He’s taken over all the heavy lifting for me. It’s made such a difference.” I was one gush away from making it sound like Keller was a willing participant in the Stanton drama, instead of a man who was there because we’d held his beloved Pax hostage. A little variation on the wisdom of Solomon. Everybody wins, right?

Corporal Nicholson. Keller. Shy guy. Rarely spoke until spoken to, which was difficult for me because I found myself shy around this perfect stranger in my house. If he’d been one of those easy sorts of guys, like Rick’s former teammates, all full of jokes and playfulness, it would have been easier for me. But Keller was quiet and respectful and clearly trying hard to keep himself out of my way. Once a week, he asked if he might use the bathtub. Once a week, he asked if he might use my washer. I told him I’d do his laundry, and he blushed, as if the thought of my handling his BVDs was humiliating. Frankly, I was just as happy to have him take care of his own washing for exactly the same reason. It was just too intimate between male and female strangers.

“I can’t have you do that for me. I’m fully capable of doing my own laundry, and you’ve got enough to do without my becoming a burden to you.”

“Mr. Nicholson. Keller, you’ve taken a burden off me.” The minute I said it, I regretted it. I sounded like I thought my husband was a burden. I’d meant the physical burden. “I don’t mean it like that.”

“I know what you mean.” He lifted his army duffel bag full of dirty clothes up onto his shoulder. “Thank you.”

I didn’t know if he meant for the compliment or the use of my Maytag.

Our days passed into something resembling a routine, and I realized one afternoon as I handed Keller a stack of folded towels and shooed him upstairs to the linen closet that I had overcome my initial unease with having a strange man in my house. What helped was that I had begun to see him not as a full-fledged grown-up, but as a younger brother. Like my younger brother, Kenny. Kenny was a tease and a pest and a disappointment because, if I’d been destined to have a younger sibling—effectively pushing me into middle-child status—I’d wanted a sister. Like Keller, Kenny was eighteen when he joined the service. He survived the Aleutians and came back just as pesty and teasing as ever, although it was only in letters and during the quick hello he was afforded during the once-a-month phone call my parents made. “Hey, Knucklehead, you still bossy as ever?”

“You still being a brat?” My riposte was never as clever as I wanted it to be. I’d lost a little of my edge.

I didn’t know if Keller had come back from the war the same as he had been or whether he’d been changed by it. He had no relatives, he said, so he had no experience of being a younger brother, pesty or not, but that’s how I saw him, or, rather, how I chose to see him—well, not the pesty part. Keller was as considerate as anyone could want. But I chose to look at him as a kid brother. Keeping him at a safe remove, but a couple of degrees up from employee.

*   *   *

“Keller, I was going to sit in the living room and listen to the news,” I said one night. “Would you like to join me?” Typically, Keller retreated to his garage space as soon as he’d gotten Rick into bed for the night. Usually, I sat with Rick until he shooed me off to bed, but on this night he’d wanted to read and sent me out of his room early.

“Sure.” His dark brown hair had grown out of its military clip since his obligatory Reserve weekend. Since then, he’d let it grow, and its poker straightness defied the Brylcreem he dabbed on it, falling against a natural center part and flopping across his brow like a little boy’s. He shoved it back and it fell forward.

I resisted the urge to comb it to the side, like I did with Rick’s when he, too, let his hair grow out of his summertime clip, when the three or four curls on the back of his head would appear and I would tease them into life with my fingers and then he would tease me into life. “How about I make us a bowl of popcorn? I think that there’s a variety show after the news.”

The living room held only a three-cushion couch and a wing-back armchair that had belonged to my grandmother and that my parents had shipped to us as an anniversary gift the fall before Pearl Harbor. When I brought the popcorn into the living room, Keller had already warmed up the radio and was sitting in the armchair. Pax was on the rug, stretched out full length, so that his head was under the coffee table. I stepped over him so that I could sit on the end of the couch closest to Keller and we could easily share the popcorn, over which I’d generously drizzled real butter—a luxury even then.

The minute I set down the bowl, Pax popped up, his amber eyes on the bounty. “No begging, you.”

“When he was in the service, he was taught never to take food from anyone but me.” Keller grabbed a handful of popcorn. “Now look at him.”

I did and saw that the velvety black of the fur on his muzzle was fading with the onset of gray hairs. Even the sooty tips of his A-frame ears were threaded through with this immutable sign that our dog, our baby, was growing older. Rick had found Pax in 38, a tiny puppy. Our dog was almost eight years old. Still fit, still lively, but no longer young.

We’d been married almost seven years. By this time, we might have had two kids, maybe three. Sometimes lying awake in my solitary bed, I thought of those never-conceived children and felt hollowed out, dried up, and no longer young.

*   *   *

I finished my ice cream soda and reapplied my Maybelline carmine red lipstick. A thin paper napkin sufficed as a blotter. Time to go home, time to go back and see if Rick had trounced Keller once again at chess.