Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings Page 10

  Mrs. Random’s interest was caught and she frowned, trying to remember. “Williams?” she asked.

  “Richards. I was Joyce Richards. My father was John Richards, and he was the clerk in the railroad station. You used to say that I could hardly wait to get away from town, the way I used to spend all my time at the station watching the trains.”

  “Richards?” said Mrs. Random wonderingly. “You must have gone away at last, then,” she added intelligently. “I heard it said you were in the city.”

  Joyce smiled, thinking that her smile, warm and proud and altogether the secret pleasant smile of a woman happy and secure, was not entirely a lie; by Mrs. Random’s standards she had certainly done very well for herself. “I’m married now,” she said, still smiling. “My husband’s a wonderful man.”

  “Girls ought to get married,” Mrs. Random said, with a sudden odd, perceptive glance at Joyce. “Keeps them out of trouble. Your old house is still there,” she went on, “but no one’s living in it. Probably open.”

  “I may still have a key to it,” said Joyce, ashamed to admit that she had carried it on her key ring all these years.

  “Go on in, then,” said Mrs. Random generously, free with any invitation except one into her own house. “Been a lot of people in and out of there, all these years.”

  Joyce lingered on the doorstep, even though Mrs. Random showed signs of wanting to withdraw and close the door. “Whatever happened to the Collinses, used to live on the other side of us?”

  “Collins?” said Mrs. Random vaguely. “Can’t recall the name. It was Williams lived there.”

  “The Cartwrights across the street?”

  “Moved, I suppose,” said Mrs. Random.

  “And Bob Cartwright?”

  “Now,” said Mrs. Random, “I do recall a Bob Cartwright. Married that plain girl. Got a little grocery or some such down on Railroad Street.”

  “Bob is married?”

  “I get my groceries at Wingdon’s,” Mrs. Random pointed out, as though it were necessary to establish this fact clearly and immediately. “Come back again sometime,” she said.

  This time she closed the door flatly, obviously having concluded that otherwise there would be no end to this conversation, and perhaps feeling that there was no harm in closing the door against the face of someone she would probably never see again.

  The roses turned slightly away from Joyce as she went down the path, and she wondered that she had ever felt free with them or if it could be true that she had once been punished for the desecration of picking one. She could see the house next door, but the hedge between had grown so dense that it did not seem likely her private path through it still existed. Nothing, she realized now, had been tended for years; she could see that on the house next door a second-story window frame sagged against the shingles, and bricks were gone from the chimney.

  I certainly won’t go in there now, she thought, not with Mrs. Random peering out from behind her curtains to see if I’ll try to steal the doors or make off with part of the fence; I’ll come back later. Perhaps, too, if she visited other old acquaintances and checked on other landmarks, she might approach this house again, later in the day or perhaps even tomorrow, more in the spirit in which she had left it, less as a stranger whom Mrs. Random could not remember. She realized that she had not asked Mrs. Random about Jean Simpson, and wondered if there were anything about her that Mrs. Random might have remembered.

  She got back into her car, aware of Mrs. Random’s critical eye from the downstairs window, and drove down the street, thinking, as she passed the streetlights and the curbs and the paths into gardens, of how many times, and always alone, she had walked and run and scuffled and skipped rope down this street. She would idle with one foot in the gutter and one on the curb, stepping gingerly in high-heeled shoes, hoping someone would notice her and speak to her, afraid sometimes, and sometimes elated, on her way to school, or to play alone in the park, and always thinking of the time when she would be rich and successful and would come back to walk with scorn past the people who had never noticed her then.

  She had always come this way, because the street ended shortly beyond her old house and fell away into fields and trees, although it might be that they had put a road through there now, since there were certainly new houses farther down the street than she remembered. Even though she was driving, which she had never done here before, she found that she was turning the car along the same old ways. She watched along the sidewalk, as she drove slowly, for her old footprints, perhaps even expecting that—as though they had told her that the old Joyce had gone on ahead, and could probably be caught up with on the way—upon turning a corner she might see, halfway down the block ahead, herself in a pink sweater and a white linen skirt, on her way to the library, carrying a book or a white patent leather purse, striding along—was she not always a little bit late?—and not turning to look at cars passing by. “Joyce,” she wanted to call, “Joyce, wait a minute, I want to tell you something.”

  Abruptly, because these streets were shorter and narrower and less alive than she had once known them, she turned a corner and found the high school facing her, and she felt swiftly, without at all wanting to, the old familiar dismay; was she late for class, were they all looking at her, was she being laughed at? Then, stopping the car and putting her chin down on the wheel, she looked the high school slowly up and down, half-smiling, as one whom it no longer had power to terrify. “So there you are,” she told it, “and I’m safe from you now, forever. I got away after all, didn’t I?” The high school stared back, square and blank and uncommunicative, as though even now what happened to Joyce Richards was unimportant.

  Beyond the red brick and the wooden facings of the school building, she could see the straight lines of the goalposts on the football field, and the long wooden bleachers. She remembered walking quickly along the path alone, on her way to a game, knowing that she went to the games, even alone and without friends, because the mere sense of being where everyone else was made her feel somehow almost a part of the crowd. Names came into her mind, and she smiled again. Katharine, she thought, pretty Katie. Married some local boy, probably, and is sitting somewhere in this town today with a pack of children and lines in her face….Dot, the most popular girl; had she stayed popular and successful, or failed miserably at some appealing career?…Was it actually possible that all these girls (Katie wearing her green skirt, Dot always a cheerleader, sarcastic Marian, and Wendy) had wandered off in different directions, and perhaps married and had children, and lived in different houses, unfamiliar and remote? Was it possible that those girls were no longer a source of laughing danger to Joyce Richards, that they were now powerless? Then what had they known, so long ago, that Joyce had not known? What power had they ever really had?

  She shook her head, amused at her own silliness, and restarted the car. No sense parking in front of the high school, where everyone would only pass by and wonder what you were doing, and she did not think that she could safely sit here and watch the new Katies and Dots and Marians come arm in arm down the walk, staring at her briefly and curiously, before turning to go toward the village. Perhaps, though, it might be Jean Simpson who came down the walk, proudly and not turning her head; not, in fact, seeming to hear anything said to her, although it was always clear from her face that she had been crying.

  Hastily, Joyce drove the car around the corner at what was almost a dangerous speed and turned onto the main street of the village; was it possible that in all these years the brightness of the Sunrise Dairy had not faded? She could see its sign halfway down the main street, past the jeweler’s, and she could see the railroad station beyond. “I should have come by train,” she told herself unreasonably, “like the way I left.” She parked the car halfway down the main street, directly in front of the Sunrise Dairy, and stepped out onto the hot, unshaded sidewalk, remembering as she did so that farther up the street, near the gas station, there was a handprint in the cement and the i
nitials JRS. The younger children had always believed that the unknown JRS had been sent to prison for defacing the sidewalk, and the more sophisticated older children told one another cynically that he had later been elected the town’s first mayor.

  The Sunrise Dairy, with its black and white tiles and its familiar smell of chocolate syrup and toast and strawberry ice cream, was for a moment loud with remembered voices, and then suddenly quiet with a late-morning silence. As she sat down at the counter she saw that actually she was alone in here, except for the counterman—could it still be Red, after all these years?—busy with something at the far end of the counter. “Lettuce and tomato and a chocolate shake,” she said, without thinking. Perhaps she had ordered these things in soda shops and drugstores and restaurants during the past ten years, but it was certain, as she said the words and then smiled reminiscently, that the correct inflection had been missing (“lettuce and tomato and a chocolate shake”), and she wondered if perhaps the general inferiority of lettuce and tomato and chocolate all these years had been due to that lost rhythm.

  “Lettuce and tomato and a chocolate shake,” the counterman said in confirmation, and she knew that she could not have forgotten his voice with its faint lisp, so she said, “It is Red, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “I thought I remembered you. But I imagine you’ve forgotten me.”

  He looked at her, his head to one side, frowning; she realized that she had remembered him as lean and young, but he was stouter now, as though the dairy had done well since she left, and his red hair was graying. “Mary?” he said. “Mary Something?”

  “No,” she said, unwilling to let him guess names she perhaps would not like to hear. “I used to be Joyce Richards.”

  “Joyce what?”

  “Joyce Richards.”

  He shook his head and smiled. “Well, you know,” he said, “I guess a hundred people come in here every day. And all those kids from the high school—”

  “I used to go to the high school.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  He turned away to make her sandwich, and because he was not looking at her she said boldly, “I’m trying to get in touch with a girl I used to know. Jean Simpson.”

  He selected a piece of lettuce and looked at it thoughtfully. “Simpson,” he said, as though she had ordered something.

  “Jean Simpson. Has she left town or anything?”

  “I couldn’t say, I really couldn’t say.”

  “You see,” she said, “she got into trouble once, and it was my fault, and I wanted to come back and sort of fix it up with her.”

  He nodded approvingly, and laid another piece of tomato on her sandwich. “Right thing to do,” he said. “What kind of trouble was it?”

  “Nothing important, just something I’d like to get straightened out.”

  “Look,” he said, glancing up at her, “what do you mean, trouble? You fight over some fellow or something?”

  “No, no,” she said.

  He hesitated, pausing with her sandwich in his hand. “Nothing serious, I suppose?”

  She thought that perhaps he would not give her the sandwich until she told him, so she said, “Well, she made a kind of mistake, and it turned out that I had to be the person who told on her.” That’s as much as he deserves to know, she thought, and it isn’t a lie if I don’t tell him the truth.

  “I did hear,” he said elaborately, “that there was a girl couple of years ago got into trouble with some man out at that roadhouse.”

  “It certainly wasn’t anything like that. Is that my sandwich?”

  “Lots of girls—”

  “Nothing serious,” she said. “If you don’t know her, it wouldn’t even interest you. It happened a long time ago.”

  “Jean Simpson,” he said reflectively. “Now you mention it, it seems to me that I heard she did something pretty bad. Not killing anyone, you understand.” He looked at her eagerly. “I might just happen to know what it was, after all,” he said.

  “You couldn’t know,” she said. “I don’t believe anyone knows anymore.”

  He grinned unpleasantly. “Never mind,” he said. “She got into some kind of trouble and you’re back now to try and fix it up. What do you get out of it?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “It’s a trifle, and all I want is to see that it’s straightened out.”

  “Oh, sure,” he said knowingly, and set the sandwich down before her. “You wouldn’t be here trying to square it unless it was something pretty important,” he said.

  “It’s a private matter,” she said, and tried to smile at him; surely it was not going to be necessary to discuss this with people like Red? If he did not remember Jean Simpson, was there any reason for telling him about old scandals? Why, after all, should she and Jean Simpson suffer because Red was curious? “You know how these things are,” she added stupidly.

  “Sure,” he said. “Right. I know.” And he winked at her.

  She lifted half of her sandwich; was not the lettuce faded and the tomato yellowed? “What do I owe you?” she asked, sliding off the stool.

  “Ninety. Might be able to help you, after all, if you’d let me know what happened.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Nothing happened. Keep the dime.”

  “Thanks, lady,” he said ironically as she went toward the door. “I’ll be asking around for your Jean Simpson.”

  Next time I’ll know, she thought, jabbing her key viciously at the car’s starter; next time I’ll know not to open my mouth and not to humiliate myself, and not to order lettuce and tomato, and next time I won’t even come back, and Jean Simpson can take care of herself. Next time, she thought, I hope Red is dead, or gone crazy or poor and starving or something.

  Well, she thought further, in a moment of utter clarity, I’ve seen my old hometown and I’ve visited my old neighbor and my old school and Red’s, and there isn’t another soul in this town who’d remember me, and that’s what I came back for—to see a crazy old woman and a gossiping old man and a fallen-down old school, and I haven’t even told Jean Simpson I’m sorry.

  There might be one more place to look, and she realized that she might have saved time and gone there earlier, as she turned the car toward the railroad station. A little grocery down on Railroad Street, Mrs. Random had said.

  Trying to fix the probable location of the grocery in her mind, she found that although she could remember the station side of Railroad Street very clearly, she had only the dimmest picture of what the other side of the street looked like. She knew that the station offices and the post office should be on her right as she approached the station, but on the left she could remember only a row of dirty little houses and perhaps a bar and grill. Hadn’t Jean Simpson lived in one of those houses? It seemed reasonable, at any rate, to turn left when she reached the station, and as she swung her car around the corner she saw ahead of her a faded sign, stiff and colorless under the hot sun. SQUARE DEAL GROCERY, it said. MEATS.

  Now, she told herself, sitting in her car in front of the grocery and staring straight ahead to where the railroad tracks disappeared between the quiet hills, now I am Joyce Duncan who used to be Joyce Richards, and I am twenty-nine years old and I live in the city with my husband. I am not nineteen, and I do not live in this town, or owe anyone here any kind of loyalty, and I do not have any crush on any Bob Cartwright, and all I am doing is trying to perform a generous act that nine people out of ten would never think about doing. I am here, she told herself, sitting in the car and not looking out at the grocery, because a long time ago I did a silly thing where I lost my head and said Jean Simpson took that money. She has every right to think I deliberately tried to get her into trouble just to save myself, and even if this is Bob Cartwright’s store he is probably married, and I am certainly married, and I am going inside only to see if he knows how I can find Jean Simpson.

  I hope he isn’t in the grocery, though, she thought, deliberately fi
xing her mind on a picture of him in a white apron, holding a butcher’s cleaver, probably haggling over small change; I hope the store is closed for the day.

  It was dark inside, and for a minute she hesitated just within the store, making out vague shapes, which were of course a counter and bins of fruit and vegetables, and rows of cans on the shelves. Then, as she let the screen door close behind her and moved toward the counter, a woman emerged from the back room brushing her hair out of her eyes and not looking up. “Yes?” she said.

  What was there to say? I would like a can of corn, please; how much do you charge for hamburger? “I’m looking for Mr. Cartwright.”

  The woman looked up at her and then away again. “He’s not here. I’m his wife.”

  It was not possible to stop and think, to remember Bob Cartwright and how he had once been too proud to speak to Joyce Richards. It was only possible to stop for a second and look again at the woman, at her dull hair and her dirty dress. But the woman was waiting, and her stance suggested strongly that unless this business with her husband was legitimate, it might be better to hurry and do whatever purchasing was necessary and then leave at once. “I actually wanted to ask him,” Joyce said hesitantly, “that is—perhaps you could tell me—I want to know whatever happened to an old friend of mine, a girl named Jean Simpson.”

  “My name used to be Jean Simpson,” said the woman. “Was it me you wanted?”