“I MOVED INTO A ROOMING HOUSE SET ASIDE FOR the young girls taking this particular commercial course. During the early morning hours I attended very drab classes, by my estimation, and then practiced typing and dictation until noon. Then I ate lunch and went to the job Mr. Roosevelt’s crowd had found for me as a way of earning towards my tuition. They’d assigned me to clerk in a candy kitchen. This, to sum it up, was not my pleasure.
Soon, however, I met a girl with some pull who got me on Saturdays at Kresge’s. you really had to have pull to get any of the advantages. I liked Kresge’s a great deal. My mother was more pleased with me there, and I kept her rummy players and Polly in pretty though modest gloves and handkerchiefs.
As well, I saved and bought gifts for the Woodliefs, my mother, and myself. For the children, of course, toys. For Trudy, a beautiful repossessed Mixmaster, which my mother and Polly walked downhill and taught her to use and which she used frequently, to everyone’s surprise. For my mother, a clock which played the “Emperor Waltz” and apparently ground on Polly’s nerves incessantly. For me, a tiny marcasite pin.
I socialized, as had always been my nature, with older women, longtime Kresge’s employees as well as my secretarial instructors. In the main all these women had been raised in Richmond. Nothing much turned their heads. Through these friends, as a matter or fact, I learned how to drink Earl Grey tea with milk, which was rough at first but by sheer force of habit became something I love.
I enjoyed meeting the nice class of people who traded at Kresge’s, particularly one very good-looking young man, Stanton, who frequented my register and seemed to have all kinds of money to spend. He bought a great deal of toiletries, and I was amazed at all the little daily grooming neccessities other Americans were doing without that he bought continuously. People just didn’t spend money on three shades of shoe polish, but Stanton did. He had a lovely overcoat as well.
I’d heard that working near the law offices I’d sooner or later meet somebody who was more or less a Virginia gentleman. Although Stanton ended up not actually coming from money, he drew a pretty good check, and in 1939 a young girl like myself rarely split hairs. And although I had never spent much time at all around young men, I seemed to do everything right when it came to drawing Stanton’s attentions. At first I thought his job and money and the mere fact of him living in Richmond would make him simply look twice and walk on, but it didn’t.
In no time at all Stanton and I hooked up and all we did was go. We went all the time! Though I didn’t drink—I never liked the way it tasted—I kept the same long hours and wild pace of those who did. Some nights Stanton and I attended house parties given by the university set, and on slow nights we spent evenings playing whist and bridge or trying to make the spirits rap. A highlight was going with him and several other young people to see the Skating Vanities, which I thought was wonderful fun and made everyone yearn to skate.
On several weekends I’d pretend to be headed home and then off Stanton and I would go, usually up over by the Eastern Shore to various nice homes owned by the free and easy crowd. All night parties were the rule there, with a great deal of sneaking off and coming back in. By the time the sun rose I was usually the only one sober as well as the only young girl who’d kept to herself, though this isn’t to say that Stanton never tried to maul me.
My health started going downhill and in no time at all Stanton put me on pep pills. He seemed to have this sort of medication at his disposal, though at the time the fact that he kept pep pills in his pockets like loose change didn’t alarm me as it should’ve. Next came the female regulators to even out my emotions, which seemed to rotate continuously.
I was taking so much of this and that to study and work that I attempted to put myself to sleep nights with a tall glass of Ovaltine, which was the rage. Stanton swore by Ovaltine and guaranteed it would knock me out but I swear I think it jiggled up my pep even more. I soon received a warning for not always showing up at school precisely, and thus I eased off the Ovaltine as well as the regulators, which testifies to the fact that I wasn’t hooked.
Three entire months went by without a visit home, and I really started to feel anxious about wanting to see my mother. We wrote frequently but of course this is never the same. So, one Sunday morning Stanton and I hopped in his car and headed south. I was very nervous though proud to be coming home with a sport. My mother’s opinion was still very important, in spite of my new independence.
We drove in the yard and walked up the steps into the house, and so far things seemed to be going very smoothly. Then my mother came in and we hugged and so on, and then I introduced her to Stanton. We small-talked a bit about the yard and such and about Polly, who my mother said had been jerked away from the breakfast table to catch a baby.
As we talked, I noticed my mother couldn’t keep her eyes off Stanton. I assumed she looked at him as hard as she did because he was so good-looking, and it didn’t seem to faze him at all as he was used to being goggled at by women. She told him to make himself comfortable, that she needed to borrow me a minute. She grabbed me under the elbow and fairly lifted me into the kitchen.
When we were by ourselves, she said she had a few questions.
I said, Like what?
Like why are that boy’s lips blue?
I said, What?
Why are they blue? Polly and I soaked cotton stockings in indigo last week and aimed for such a blue. They’re unnatural, Betty.
At first I thought it was just my mother noticing details, but when I went back in the room and saw him there on the sofa, the sight sunk in. I don’t know how I could’ve been so blind. Perhaps they’d been turning so slowly I hadn’t noticed, like plants growing. But, yes, they were blue. I tried not to say anything and enjoy lunch and the afternoon, but once I noticed Stanton’s lips, when I looked at him they were all I could see. I could tell they were driving my mother crazy. I would see her catch herself staring at them and glance off, but then she finally gave up and simply locked her gaze.
I welcomed the relief of Stanton saying he wanted to walk out and enjoy the grape arbor while my mother and I caught up. She and I spent the entire time he was out of the house arguing.
They’re certainly blue all right, like he’s frozen.
You’re making a big commotion over nothing.
No, I’m not. You haven’t noticed before now? Did they just get like this? How well do you know this boy? Something’s off about him. He’s twisted in his seat since he sat down. And what about you? Why are you so pasty-looking?
I told her that I hadn’t noticed the blue until that morning, and that I knew Stanton well, though not too well. And although he’d had the jitters since I’d met him, I told her that she’d squirm and jitter too if she was under the kind of gaze she’d trapped him under. And as for myself, I said I couldn’t account for my skin, although I swore I’d been eating square meals.
Stanton came back in directly and we left back for Richmond. I had him ride by Sade and Amanda’s houses and toot the horn, according to my mother’s instruction. In spite of his lips, she was anxious for her friends to know that I had a sport with an automobile. She told me to drive by only. She was very firm about this. She didn’t want to fend off Sade and Amanda’s lip curiosity all week. Don’t stop and go in. They can see he’s good-looking enough from the road. Okay?
Stanton and I made casual conversation all the way to Virginia, but I couldn’t find the right way to ask any questions. I did notice how much he jittered, though, which I hadn’t really thought about until my mother pointed it out. But I tried not to think about any of it. He was so good-looking. I didn’t want to rock the boat and turn 1939 into the year known as the year Betty tried and failed to have a young man.
He let me off at the rooming house and I went in and studied, thinking everything was pretty normal otherwise. And then I didn’t see nor hear from him all week, which was very unusual. I started to worry about his welfare, although half of me wondered if he’d gotten home after our trip and decided to bail out. So I was half worried about him for his well-being and half worried for mine. Then a few more days passed and all my worry melted into sheer anger.
About the time I was ready to throw up my hands I got a telephone call downstairs from a hospital nurse with a message from Stanton. The message was to bring him a carton of cigarettes. I asked this lady what in the world he was doing in the hospital, and she told me very curtly, He’s sick.
She cut me off in a rude manner, and there I was faced with the task of delivering a carton of Luckies to the hospital for someone who I hadn’t heard from in over a week. I wasn’t overworried about his health at that point. If he could smoke, he surely wasn’t near death or even under an oxygen tent.
I got myself in gear and made the purchase and off I went. Before I went to his ward, though, I stopped at the nurse’s station and inquired about his illness. Naturally I feared stepping out into the unknown. What I was told was that Stanton had been brought in with acetanilid poisoning, apparently from going overboard with Neurol Compound, and he’d been in bad shape, though now he’d turned the corner. The nurse went on to say that he was just down the hall, in his usual room. His usual room! She went on to explain that Stanton was a patient on this particular dope ward about twice, sometimes three times a year. I’m sure she assumed I loved to indulge as well.
Yes, I was stunned. But then all those regulators and pep pills floated up, and I thought, Thank goodness I had the will not to get hooked. I was embarrassed at my stupidity, thinking he was doing me a favor. But what of this Neurol Compound? I had witnessed Stanton taking enough of these remedies, frankly, to kill a horse. I told him once that anybody whose head popped and rang to that extent should go see a doctor, but I was made to feel funny for caring enough to say anything, thus I backed off.
So on in I went to see him. He saw me coming and shouted to me like he’d spotted me in a crowd at the ballpark. He yelled, Hey, girlie! You sure look swell! Bring me those cigs!
He was sitting up and looked fairly healthy, though weak-eyed. And his lips looked fine as well, nice and pink. I slammed his cigarettes on the nightstand and said outright, I refuse to believe I’ve been going with a dope fiend.
He said, Then, girlie, you shouldn’t believe it. He more or less snickered between his teeth. Chee, chee, chee.
I said, Listen, you need to get well and get your life in order. I told him I’d discovered he was a regular on the dope ward, which didn’t embarrass him as it would anybody with scruples. And I said as well that I was humiliated over having swallowed all his lies, plain and fancy.
He had something sneering to say about how fast I trotted downtown with his cigarettes, to which I replied that if he was such a big man why didn’t he pick up the phone and order me down there himself? Why’d he make a nurse call me?
Then I left, hearing him yell for me all the way to the steps, Hey, girlie! Come back, girlie! The fact of him calling me girlie hadn’t bothered me until then, and walking to the rooming house I had to think of what my mother had told me. And I sat out on the stoop a great while trying to think if the young man had ever called me by name. I convinced myself he had, though to be honest, I’m not sure if he had or he hadn’t. He seemed worlds away from the young man who had first bowled me over in front of my register at Kresge’s. And then two thoughts twirled through my mind and kept me up a long while that evening. Could I have been that bad a judge of character, and what will I tell my mother?
The next morning I wrote home and told her the truth. I simply had to. Then I cried miserably and went to bed, wondering if I’d be better off simply married to Luther Miracle, chopping his cotton and nursing his children, cooking his suppers in spite of his obnoxious mother and his locks and locks of dirty hair.
My mother wrote back right away and told me to consider coming home, if for no other reason than my own safety.
Just a note. So many young people are going to the bad these days and if you don’t consider yourself strong enough to keep out of trouble living the high life then you should come home in spite of the fact that you may think I’m just trying to get you back here and as well Polly Deal talks continuously and I need somebody here to help me listen to her.
Love,
Your mother Lottie
I wrote her back and said I wanted to stay in Richmond and make the best of things, and I apologized if this broke her heart. However, as soon as I got home from the post office I started packing like the house was on fire, and in twelve hours I was on my way out of Richmond, Virginia, where sin was and probably still is very, very handy.
Needless to say, my mother was glad to see me. Polly Deal was as well, although she told me right away that she’d moved into my bedroom and was comfortable to the point of contentment. She was very quiet, looking straight at me, waiting until I finally said, Well, you stay right there then and I’ll move in the room with my mother.
She didn’t thank me. She merely said, If I look in a weakened state, it’s because some folks have upset my constitution and made my misery their daily intent. Then she excused herself to my bedroom, locked the door, and cranked the radio up.
I asked my mother what was wrong with Polly, and I was told she’d had a row with a town lady of some means who’d heard tales of Polly’s touch with fine laundry and looked to hire her.
So this lady sent out her son with a bundle, which Polly did in good order and sent back and all was well. And then here’s this lady showing up in my yard, getting Polly out around where I couldn’t see from the window, involving Polly in a horrible dispute. She left, and Polly ran past me and locked herself up and wouldn’t talk, not at first, though later she came in my room and crawled right in the bed with me and cried, saying that this woman had slapped her in the face for scorching her pet handkerchief. This was a bad, bad thing to see happening to her. I’d never seen her like this. She went to sleep right with me. Right with me! This was not the modest Polly Deal I knew. And then she woke up in the morning mad at the world, swearing off all but her own laundry in protest.
All she’ll do is cook now, and not with a great deal of enthusiasm anymore, and then sit in the room with the radio blaring, waiting to be engaged for a birthing, packing and repacking her little medical satchel. And if she’s not doing this, she talks and talks and rambles and rambles. Polly is simply not herself.
So, added to the natural reason my mother was glad to see me was this fact of Polly swearing off laundry. When my mother said she’d been handed the task of doing her own things plus the Woodliefs’ things as we’d promised, I said, Well, I know this has been wearing you out. But then she took me to the laundry porch and showed me piles and mounds and heaps of everything she just hadn’t been able to talk herself into doing. Thus I changed into a shirtwaist and dug back in on Milk Farm Road.
But, not to leave Stanton in the air in Richmond—I didn’t intend to keep up with him once I left there. I didn’t love him as I had, especially after seeing his true colors revealed to me on the dope ward. But he found a replacement very quickly. Fast men always do.
A few days after I got home I got a letter from one of my Kresge’s girlfriends saying she’d seen Stanton on the street that morning. He and his new girl were thrashing out their personal business in front of a gallery row of onlookers. They both looked ready for a shroud. She was a very frazzled young thing and had on a garish dress and white shoes in spite of October. That’s what he was reduced to after me.
And then I wasn’t home three months before she wrote me with the news that Stanton had dropped dead from being too high off aromatic spirits of ammonia. Of course I was still angry and embarrassed over Richmond, but I was also very sad. Sometimes Stanton had a way of treating me so kindly. Sometimes he pleased me better than I could please myself.
My mother saw me reading and wanted to see the letter, and after she read it she sat by me on the sofa. If you and him had stayed together just think of how broken up you’d be right now! Whew!
Then she took my hand and rubbed and patted it in her old way and told me that I’d returned home just in time, in the nick of time. Honey, there’s somebody due back next week from Dismal Swamp who might interest you. From all reports, he’s been out there getting better looking every day, and smarter.