Read an Excerpt
From Come Along With Me:
I always believe in eating when I can. I had plenty of money and no name when I got off the train and even though I had had lunch in the dining car I liked the idea of stopping off for coffee and a doughnut while I decided exactly which way I intended to go, or which way I was intended to go. I do not believe in turning one way or another without consideration, but then neither do I believe that anything is positively necessary at any given time. I got off the train with plenty of money; I needed a name and a place to go; enjoyment and excitement and a fine high gleefulness I knew I could provide on my own.
A woman said to me in the train station, “My sister might want to rent a room to a nice lady; she’s got this little crippled kid.”
I could use a little crippled kid, I thought, and so I said, “Where does your sister live, dear?”
A fine high gleefulness; I think you understand me; I have everything I want.
I sold the house at a profit. Once I got Hughie buried—my God, he was a lousy painter—I only had to make a thousand and three trips back and forth from the barn—which was a studio, which was a mess—to the house. At my age and size—both forty-four, in case it’s absolutely vital to know—I was carrying those paintings and half-finished canvasses (“This is the one the artist was working on the morning of the day he died,” and it was just as lousy as all the rest; not even imminent glowing death could help that Hughie) and books and boxes of letters and more than anything else cartons and cartons of things Hughie saved, his old dance programs and marriage licenses and fans and the like. It was none of it anything I ever wanted to see again, I promise you, but I didn’t dare throw any of it away for fear Hughie might turn up someday asking, the way they sometimes do, and knowing Hughie it would be the carbon copy of something back in 1946 he wanted. Everything he might ever possibly come around asking for went into the barn; one thousand and three trips back and forth.
I am not a callous person and no one Hughie ever knew could possibly call me practical, but I had waited long enough. I knew I could sell the house. The furniture went to everyone, and I did think that was funny. They came up to me at the auction, people I had known for years, people who had come to the funeral, people who had sat on the chairs and eaten at the dining-room table and sometimes passed out on the beds, if the truth were known, and they said things like “I bought your little maple desk and anytime you want it back it’s waiting for you,” and “Listen, we picked up the silver service, but it’s nothing personal,” and “You know the piano will find a happy home with us,” and “We are grieving with you today”—no, that one they said at the funeral. In any case, all the people I had known for years came to the auction and the ones who had the nerve came up and spoke to me, sometimes embarrassed because here they were peeking at the undersprings of my sofa, and sometimes just plain brazen because they had gotten something of mine they wanted. I heard one woman—no names, of course; no one has a name yet—saying to another woman that the dining-room breakfront had always been wasted on me, which was true; I only kept it at all because I was afraid my dead grandmother would come around asking. Actually, almost all of it was wasted on me. It was Hughie’s idea. “You come of such a nice family,” he used to say to me, “your people were all such cultivated educated people; try to remember.”
So that was how I started out. I’d thought about it for a long time of course—not that I positively expected I was going to have to bury Hughie, but he had a good life—and everything went the way I used to figure it would. I sold the house, I auctioned off the furniture, I put all the paintings and boxes in the barn, I erased my old name and took my initials off everything, and I got on the train and left.
I can’t say I actually chose the city I was going to; it was actually and truly the only one available at the moment; I hadn’t ever been there and it seemed a good size and I had enough in my pocket to pay the fare. When I got off the train I took a deep breath of the dirty city air and carried my suitcase and my pocketbook and my fur stole—Hughie wasn’t selfish, I don’t want to give a wrong impression; I always had everything I wanted—and stopped at the counter for coffee and doughnuts.
“My sister might want to rent a room to a nice lady,” this woman said to me, “she’s got this little crippled kid.”
So I said, “Where does your sister live, dear?”
That was where I got my first direction, you see. Smith Street. Where I was going to be living for a while.
The city is a pretty city, particularly after living in the country; I have nothing actually against trees and grass, of course, but Hughie always wanted to live in the country. There was a zoo somewhere in this city, and a college, and a few big stores, and streetcars, which I believe you don’t often see any more. I knew there was an art gallery—who could be married to Hughie, that painter, and not know about an art gallery?—and a symphony orchestra, and surely a little theater group, mostly wives and fairies; if I liked the city and I stayed I might look up the little theater group; there was an art movie and I hoped at least one good restaurant; I am a first-rate cook.
More than anything else, more than art movies or zoos, I wanted to talk to people; I was starved for strangers. I began with the woman at the counter in the railroad station.
“She has this little crippled kid.”
“Where does your sister live, dear?”
“She was married to the same man for twenty-seven years and all he left her was the house and this little kid, he’s crippled. Me, I don’t like a man like that.”
“They don’t leave you with much, and that’s a fact.”
“After twenty-seven years married to the same man she shouldn’t have to take in roomers.”
“But if one of her roomers turns out to be me it might all have been worthwhile.”
“That’s where I’ve been, visiting my sister.” She put down her coffee cup. “I come to visit her. And then I take the train back home. You have to take the train to get from my house to hers.” She looked at me carefully, as though she might be wondering whether I could remember my own name. “She lives on Smith Street. You’ll know the house. It’s big. She’s got this sign ROOMS.”
“At least he left her a big house,” I said.
“Up and down stairs all the time, keeping up a big house these days. She’s not getting any younger, and the kid.”
“Well, we’re none of us,” I said.
After that I talked to a man on a corner; he was waiting for a streetcar. “Does this streetcar go to Smith Street?” I asked him.
“What streetcar?” He turned and looked down the street.
“The one you’re waiting for; this is a car stop, isn’t it?”
He looked again, and we marveled together at the delights of the city, where you could stand on a corner and a streetcar would come. “Where you say?” he asked me.
“Smith Street.”
“You live there?”
“Yes. I got this little crippled kid. Big house.”
“No,” he said, “you get that car across the street. Because across the street is going the other way. How long you say you’ve lived there?”
“Twenty-seven years. With the same man.”
“He any better at catching streetcars than you are?”
“He’s a motorman,” I told him. “I try to avoid his route.”
This clearly sounded right to him. “Women always checking up,” he said, and turned away from me.
Then I talked to an old lady in a bookshop, who was so very tired that she leaned her elbows on piles of books as we talked; she told me that the city was hell on books, because of the college, and they stole a thousand paperbacks a year. “They can’t seem to think of them as books,” she said, furious, “books they don’t dare steal because of the covers. Also they know I’m watching.”
“Do you sell a lot of books?”
“It’s the college,” she said. “They come here to get an education.” She laughed, furious. “No one speaks English any more,” she said. She took her elbows off the pile of books and went back to sit down on a dirty old chair in the back of the store. “I’m watching,” she called out, “I’m still watching,” but I was leaving.
I went to the correct side of the street and put my suitcase down and waited carrying my pocketbook and my fur stole until a streetcar came by reading SMITH STREET and I decided well this is certainly the streetcar they meant when they said it went to Smith Street. I swung my suitcase on and climbed up behind it; you know, they know old ladies—not me—and little crippled kids and pregnant women and maybe sick people with broken arms are all going to have to ride on those streetcars; you’d think they didn’t want passengers, the way they make those steps. I suppose the salary they pay the motorman he wouldn’t help anyone anyway. He looked at me; he was sitting down driving his streetcar and I was climbing on with my suitcase and my pocketbook and my fur stole, and I figured if he wasn’t going to help me I wasn’t going to help him, so I said, “Does this streetcar go to Smith Street?”
He looked at me; I must say I like it better when they look at you; a lot of the time people seem to be scared of finding out that other people have real faces, as though if you looked at a stranger clearly and honestly and with both eyes you might find yourself learning something you didn’t actually want to know. “Lady,” he said, “I promise you. This streetcar goes to Smith Street every trip. That’s why,” he said, and he was not smiling, “that’s why it says so on the front.”
“You’re sure?” I was not smiling either and he knew he had met someone as stubborn as he was, so he quit.
“Yes, lady,” he said. “I’m almost positive.”
“Thank you,” I said. It never pays to let a minute like that slip by; every word counts. I might never see that motorman again, but on the other hand, I might be living on Smith Street and ride home with him every night. He might get to calling me by whatever name I finally picked out and I might take to asking him every night how his wife’s asthma was today and did his daughter break up with that guy who stole the money and I might take to asking him every night, “Say, driver, does this streetcar go to Smith Street?”
And he might say, every night, not smiling, “Yes, lady, it surely does.”
Hughie would not have thought any of that was funny. In case he ever does come back asking I will certainly remember not to tell him.
There is a kind of controlled madness to streetcars; they swing along as though they haven’t quite come to terms with tracks yet, and haven’t really decided whether tracks are here to stay or streetcars are here to stay on tracks; they swing and tilt and knock people around, especially people who are trying to hold onto a suitcase and a pocketbook and a fur stole. I sat there sliding around on the seat and wondering if anyone was laughing at me and wondering if maybe I was the streetcar type after all, and outside the window the city went by. I saw the biggest store in town and thought that someday very soon I would be in there, and I might say, “Well, if you haven’t got this blouse in a size forty-four I’ll just run across the street and try there.” I would have to have a name before I could open any charge accounts anywhere. “I’d rather you didn’t carry money,” Hughie used to say, “I want you to go into a store and pick out what you want and tell them your name and walk out; I don’t care if it’s a thousand dollars, just tell them your name and take what you want.” There were hotels; I might come back for a visit someday, and see all my old friends on Smith Street; I might go tea-dancing at the Splendid Hotel, although one letter was missing from its marquee; I might drop into the lobby of the Royal Hotel to hear who was being paged, and pick up a name that way. I saw a drugstore where I might get a prescription filled and buy shampoo, I saw a shop where I might buy records and a place to get my shoes repaired and a laundry and a candy store and a grocery and a leather shop and a pet shop and a toy store. It was a proper little city, correct and complete, set up exactly for my private use, fitted out with quite the right people, waiting for me to come. I slid around on the streetcar seat and thought that they had done it all very well.
I must say that motorman got the last word. I was still looking out the window when he turned around and yelled, “Smith Street.” In case there was any doubt about who he was yelling at he pointed his finger at me.
“How is your wife’s asthma?” I asked him when I came down the aisle with my suitcase and my pocketbook and my fur stole.
“Better, thank you,” he said. “Watch your step.”
It was Smith Street all right; no one had lied to me yet. They wanted to make sure I got there as planned; there was a sign on the corner saying SMITH STREET.
I was glad to see that there were trees; far down, at the end, I could see what looked like a little park, and on either side of Smith Street going down to the park there were trees. I thought I would enjoy coming home under the trees, in the rain, perhaps, or in the fall when the leaves were dropping. I thought I would enjoy hearing the sound of the leaves brushing against my window. The houses were the kind no one has built for a good twenty-seven years, big and ample and made for people who liked to sit on their own front porches and watch their neighbors. There were lawns and bushes and garden hoses, there were dogs. The house I wanted was on my right, about halfway down the block; it was a big house with a sign saying ROOMS although I didn’t see any little kids looking crippled. I stood across the street from the house for a few minutes; here I am, I thought, here I am.
No one, anywhere, anytime, had given me any word of any other place to go. This was the only objective I had; if I didn’t go in here they wouldn’t tell me any other place to go. I wondered which room was going to be mine and whether I would look down from its window onto the street and see myself standing there looking up and waiting; by the time I looked out of the window I would have to have a name.
Right then I wished I could sit down for a minute and maybe have a little something to eat; nothing looks sillier than a forty-four-year-old woman standing on a sidewalk with a suitcase and a pocketbook and a fur stole trying to think up a name for herself. Somewhere down the street someone called a dog, calling “Here, Rover,” and I thought that Rover was probably a good name but it was not actually exactly what I was looking for; I thought I might stop someone going by and ask for their name but no one wants to give away a name that might be terribly important to keep, and even if they did tell it to me I might not be able to spell it or even pronounce it right and if you’ve got a name at all you’ve got to be able to say it out loud. I thought of Laura, but Laura was my mother’s name. I didn’t want any more of Hughie and his names, and Bertha was my grandmother and who wants to be named Bertha, particularly after her grandmother? I thought of Muriel but that just sounds like someone who gets raped and robbed in an alley. I once had a cat named Edward, and because he was silver I changed his name to Stargazer and then in the spring to Robin, and when I got tired, which I did very soon, of a cat named Robin, I tried to change his name to Edward again and he got sick and died. You have to be terribly careful with names; one too many and you lose.
I thought of Jean and Helen and Margaret, but I knew people called by all those names, and perhaps I would not enjoy answering to them; I thought of Gertrude and Goneril and I thought of Diana, which was dead wrong and Minerva, which was closer but silly. I knew I had to think of something right away, and I got a little chill at the back of my neck; what is really more frightening than being without a name, nothing to call yourself, nothing to say when they ask you who you are? Then it fell on me; I heard it: Angela. It was right, Angela was the name I had come all this way to find.
The rest of it was easy; I had said it already. Angela Motorman. Mrs. Angela Motorman.
So Mrs. Angela Motorman walked slowly and decently up the walk to the fine old house with the sign in the window saying ROOMS. She was carrying her suitcase and her pocketbook and her fur stole, and she stopped for a minute to look the house over very carefully; a lady cannot be too wary of the company she may find herself among, a lady chooses her place of residence with caution. As she set her foot on the steps she put her shoulders back and took a deep breath: Mrs. Angela Motorman, who never walked on earth before.
2
I must say she had the good sense to offer me a cup of tea right away, once she found out I was a friend of her sister’s, and in case you are wondering about me having lunch on the train and coffee and a doughnut in the station, and now a cup of tea and cookies, let me just remark that I have plenty of room to put it all.
“And what do you do, Mrs. Motorman?” she asked me.
“I dabble in the supernatural,” I told her.
Her name was Mrs. Faun; we both had names. “How is my sister?” she wanted to know.
“Doing well,” I said. “Of course, she has her troubles like the rest of us.”
I had taken to the house right away; I like most houses, and this was one of the best. The staircase was good, wide and clearly worn by a hundred trips up and down every day, up and down, up and down till your feet could fall off. It was a solid house, a devil to clean, but prepared to stand right where it was forever; enough people had lived here to make the air very alive; I was ready for any number to come around asking, but first I had to deal with Mrs. Faun.
“I’ve just buried my husband,” I said.
“I’ve just buried mine,” she said.
“Isn’t it a relief?” I said.
“What?” she said.
“It was a very sad occasion,” I said.
“You’re right,” she said, “it’s a relief.”
She had a jaw and she served a strong cup of tea and I would not say a bad word against a woman who put out her own homemade sugar cookies for a guest; I am an excellent cook. The tea was served in the kitchen; as soon as I said I was a friend of her sister’s she said, quite rightly, “I was just having a cup of tea; come on in the kitchen.”
When I tried to say it for the first time I was not actually certain how it was going to sound, because no one had ever said it before in the history of this earth, and I thought to myself, I’m giving birth. “I’m Mrs. Angela Motorman,” I said.
“I’m Mrs. Faun,” she said right back. “I was just having a cup of tea.”
I thought that Mrs. Faun and I were going to be all right together. I didn’t know yet whether she had a silly laugh, or went on tapping her fingers on the table, but I liked her kitchen, which had no gadgets, and I liked her stove, which was still warm from making sugar cookies, and I liked her jaw.
“I’m not saying I want a room and I’m not saying I don’t,” I told her, “but if I did, what would you have to show me?”
“I’m not saying I have a room and I’m not saying I don’t,” she said right back, “but if you wanted to look I could let you see a very pretty little place.”
Oh, I was going to be all right with Mrs. Faun. I liked her jaw and I liked her stove and I liked her house and if she wanted to have a little crippled kid I was certainly not going to stand in her way; “It’s hard for a woman alone,” I said.
“And what do you do, Mrs. Motorman?”
“I dabble in the supernatural.”
“My niece had this meningitis,” she said as though I had asked some kind of a question. “Let me fill your cup. She had this meningitis and it got to her heart. They knew it was going to, of course, but they never told her. She had it for years before she found out it got to her heart.”
“My cousin had mercury poisoning,” I said. “That goes directly to the heart, of course. He only lasted for about three days.”
“I had a cousin something like that,” she said. “You mentioned what a short time they last. Only in her case it all went to the brain. Reddest face I ever saw and she died not knowing one of us.”
“My aunt was the same,” I said. “Only she died of pneumonia; that’s a very quick one. It catches you without any warning, you swell up, and there you go.”
“Bloated,” she said, “like my nephew, only his was alcohol.”
“And then there was this friend of mine,” I said. “She had cirrhosis of the scalp. They don’t have a cure yet for any of those things, you know, and they run right through you. I hate to think of the way my friend went right on suffering until the very end.”
“Very often the end is the most to be desired,” she said. “There was a friend of mine, we all couldn’t wait for her to go, but she had cancer. Incurable.”
“I had a friend who had cancer,” I said, “but they cut off her right leg.”
“That’s never enough,” she said. “Mark me, she’ll be back for her other leg. I knew a woman once who lost both arms that way.”
“My uncle fell under a truck,” I said. I wondered if I should tell her about my great-aunt.
“I’m sorry about your uncle,” she said. “Do you want a room or don’t you?”
“I do.”
“And what do you do, Mrs. Motorman?”
“I dabble in the supernatural. Traffic with spirits. Seances, messages, psychiatric advice, that kind of thing.”
“I never had one of those before,” Mrs. Faun said. “I’m not saying I haven’t had all kinds. You rent out rooms, it’s sometimes a surprise what you get.”
“I never lived in a room before.”
You won’t find it terribly difficult,” she said, not smiling. “All you have to do is pay for it regularly. I’d be willing to add some meals, but that would be extra.”
“Perhaps I could give a hand with the cooking; I’m a fine cook.”
“I’m not sure but what that would be extra too,” she said. “You may not cook in your room.”
“I promise,” I said.
“You may not smoke in your bed.”
“I promise.”
“You may not make noise late at night.”
“I promise.”
“These are all safety precautions,” she explained to me. “Thou shalt not—I mean, you may not keep dirty pets.”
“I promise.”
“You may not spread any contagious diseases. Although the room I plan to show you has a private bath. Linen provided, we do the heavy cleaning, and anything you raise by way of spirits you have to put back yourself.”
Oh, I liked Mrs. Faun. She turned her head suddenly and then she stood up and went over to the back door of the kitchen, the door leading outside, and opened it. “Little early today,” she said, and “Must have run all the way,” which was clearly some kind of a private joke because there was laughter. I helped myself to another cookie, and then Mrs. Faun came back pushing the wheelchair; there was a ramp built outside the door so she could push it right inside without difficulty. “This is my son Tom,” Mrs. Faun said, “Tom, this is Mrs. Motorman.” Once again it sounded all right; I was going to learn to answer to it.
“Hi,” the boy in the wheelchair said. He seemed to be about twelve years old, although it’s hard to tell with a boy sitting down. “Any cookies left?”
“I got my share,” I said. “Someday if you want me to I’ll make you my special chocolate cake; it’s got five layers.”
“Okay,” he said, and then he laughed. “Motorman’s a funny name,” he said.
“I just made it up,” I told him. “You just home from school?”
“I like school,” he said, “but they’re always surprised I’m not smarter, because I don’t play baseball and stuff, they always think I’m going to be smarter than anyone else. And I’m not.”
“Maybe if you practice,” I said.
“One kid pushes me down the street every morning and another kid pushes me back home in the afternoon. They do all the pushing and I ride both ways and it’s great, but I’m not as smart as they think I ought to be.”
“You’re smart enough for your own good,” Mrs. Faun said. She brought him a glass of milk and pushed the plate of cookies a little closer to him. “I’ll go and check your room,” she said to me.
“I’m pretty smart,” he said to me anxiously. “I’m not stupid, of course.”
“I’m pretty smart, but I never got pushed back and forth to school.”
“Well, I’m planning to be a scholar, and I better get started pretty soon. You know any Spanish?”
“No.”
“I want to learn Spanish and French and Italian and Russian and then Latin and Greek and be a scholar. So far I only know a little Spanish, but I’m lazy.”
“One of these days I might push you to the movies,” I said.
“I would like that,” he said. “Perhaps a movie in Spanish or French to improve my accent.”
We each had another cookie. Then he said, “What do you study, Mrs. Motorman?”
“I was married to a painter.”
“Was he any good?”
“He was lousy.”
“Is he dead?”
“Yes.”
“How long you think I ought to go on studying Spanish before I start French? They’re both good languages.”
“If you’re so lazy why not give up the whole thing?”
“Well,” he said, thinking, “I suppose it’s because they all keep waiting for me to be so smart. I wouldn’t play baseball if I could, you can hurt yourself playing those games. But I don’t mind being a scholar.”
“Look,” I said, “I’m not used to talking to kids.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he said.
“I don’t know why you can’t just sit around and read books.”
Mrs. Faun came back and said “Drink your milk there,” and “Your room is ready.” She touched the boy on the head and he said, “Hey, Mrs. Motorman and I are going to the movies someday,” and Mrs. Faun looked at me for a minute and then said, “I think you’re going to like the room.”
3
I brought a couple of cookies upstairs with me, just in case. My room was perfectly square, which was good. My name was Mrs. Angela Motorman and this was where I was going to live, in a square room in Mrs. Faun’s house on Smith Street. I did not know as yet what I was going to add to this room; it already held a bed and a dresser and two chairs and a pretty little desk, something like the pretty little desk I had last seen disappearing into the back of a station wagon when I had my auction. There was nothing in these desk drawers; I did not know as yet what I was going to put in them. There was a little bookcase which would hold, I thought, perhaps eleven books; I would have to choose my eleven books very carefully; when I found them I could write “Angela Motorman” on the flyleaves. I put my underwear and stockings into the dresser drawers, and hung my two dresses and my fur stole in the closet; someday I would go to the department stores and buy new clothes; I put my brush and comb on the dresser and put my sleeping pills on the bedside table and put my reading glasses beside them. I had no pets, no address books, no small effects to set around on tables or pin on walls, I had no lists of friends to keep in touch with and no souvenirs; all I had was myself.
I like people, but I have never needed companions; Hughie was my only mistake.
I set an armchair next to the window of my room, and I was pleased to see that I did indeed look out over the trees and onto the spot on the street where I had stood not long ago wondering over a name; “It’s all right, Angela,” I said very softly out the window, “it’s all right, you made it, you came in and it’s all right; you got here after all.” And outside the dim nameless creature named herself Mrs. Angela Motorman and came steadily to the door.
4
I have a real feeling for shapes; I like things square, and my room was finely square. Even though I couldn’t cook there I thought I could be happy. I wanted the barest rock bottom of a room I could have, I wanted nothing but a place to sleep and a place to sit and a place to put my things; any decorating done to my environment is me.
One reason is, the first time it happened was in a square room, my own room when I was about twelve. Before then, most of it was just whisperings and little half-thoughts, the way a child almost notices something, almost remembers, but this time it was real and I was not dreaming; I know when I’m dreaming. I sat up in bed in the middle of the night, and heard my own voice saying “What? What?” and then I heard another voice, not coming out of my own head—I know what comes out of my own head—saying “Find Rosalind Bleeker. Tell her Sid says hello.” Three times I heard that crazy voice say “Tell her Sid says hello.”
I knew Rosalind Bleeker—in all the years since I’ve never forgotten her name—and because she was four or five years older and in high school I had a little trouble finding her the next day, but I caught her when she was walking home. I remember I had trouble getting her attention; I was just a little kid, and she was popular and pretty and always laughing. She was wearing a white blouse and a blue skirt and a charm bracelet. Her hair was curly. She was carrying her biology textbook and a blue-covered notebook. Her shoes were white. Her eyes were blue. She wore a little lipstick. I pulled at her sleeve and said “Rosalind, hey, Rosalind,” not very loud because she was a high-school girl. She turned around and looked down at me and frowned, because I was a kid and she was a high-school girl and here I was pulling at her sleeve. “Listen, Rosalind,” I said, “listen. I’m supposed to tell you Sid says to say hello.” “What?” she said. “Sid says to say hello,” I said, and then ran, because I had nothing more to say and I felt silly. I heard later she went home and hanged herself. I don’t know.
Anyway, that was the first time. After that there were lots more, some more real than others. There was the time I said to my mother, “Grandma just picked up the phone to call you,” and she said, “That’s nice,” just as the phone rang. She looked at me funny; they always did after a while.
“I dabble in the supernatural,” I told Mrs. Faun; she thought I was making some kind of a joke.
I quit when I married Hughie; you’d have to.
I remember another time when I sat by the window and my mother, who ought to have known better by then, said to me, “Why are you always brooding, staring out the window, never doing anything?”
“I’m watching the peacocks walking on the lawn,” I said.
“But you ought to be out playing with the other children; why do you suppose we moved here to a nice neighborhood, so you could always sit looking out the window instead of playing with the other kids? Haven’t you got any friends? Doesn’t anyone like you?”
“I’m watching the peacocks,” I tried to tell her. “They’re walking on the lawn and I’m watching them.”
“You ought to be out with your friends. What are peacocks doing on our lawn, ruining the grass?” and she came over to look out the window; as I say, she ought to have known better.
Sometimes I knew and sometimes I didn’t; there would be times when I lay on my stomach on the floor watching creatures playing under the dining-room table, and I knew then of course that my mother wasn’t going to see them and was maybe going to put her foot through one when she came by to say why did they move to a nice neighborhood and I wouldn’t go out and make friends. Sometimes my good square room would be so full I just lay in bed and laughed. Sometimes weeks would go by and I would be reading some specially interesting book, or painting, or following people every day after school, and nothing would come at all; sometimes they followed me; once an old man followed me, but he turned out to be real. I could see what the cat saw.
When I was about sixteen I began to get self-conscious about all of it; it wasn’t that I minded them coming around asking and following me everywhere I went; most sixteen-year-old girls like to be followed, but by then I knew no one else was going to see them and sometimes I felt like a fool; you don’t go around staring at empty air all the time, not when you’re sixteen years old you don’t, not without people beginning to notice. “Do you need glasses?” my mother used to ask me, or “Can’t you for heaven’s sake stop gawking at nothing and shut your mouth and comb your hair and get out with the other kids?” Then sometimes for weeks at a time I would think that they had gone away, maybe for good, and I’d start taking care of my hair and putting polish on my nails and hanging around the soda shop or going to a football game, and then first thing I knew I’d be talking to someone and a face would come between us and a mouth would open saying some crazy thing, and I’d be watching and listening and whomever I had been talking to would wait for a few minutes and then get edgy and walk away while I was still listening to some other voice. After a while I just stopped talking to anybody.
That’s not a good way for a girl to grow up. It’s easy to say that if I knew then what I know now I could have handled it better; how can anyone handle things if her head is full of voices and her world is full of things no one else can see? I’m not complaining.
I sat in my pleasant square room at Mrs. Faun’s house and thought about it all. Ever since I can remember, I thought as quietly as I could, I have been seeing and hearing things no one else could see and hear. By now I can control the nuisance to some extent. It disappeared entirely when I married Hughie; I have reason to believe now that it is coming back. I sat in Mrs. Faun’s house and thought what good did it do to sell the house and find a new name; they don’t care what your name is when they come around asking.
At first I tried to point them out to people; I was even foolish enough at first to think other people just hadn’t noticed; “Look at that,” I would say, “look, right over there, it’s a funny man.” It didn’t take long for my mother to put a stop to that; “There isn’t any funny man anywhere,” she would say, and jerk on my arm, “what kind of a sewer do you have for a mind?” Once I tried to tell a neighbor about it; it was quite accidental, because I rarely told anyone anything. He was sitting on his front porch one evening in summer and I had been lying on the grass on our lawn, watching small lights go and come among the grass blades, and listening to a kind of singing—sometimes, especially in summer, it was a kind of pleasant world I lived in—and he heard me laughing. He asked me to come and sit on his front porch and he gave me a glass of lemonade, and when he asked me what I had been doing I went ahead and told him. I told him about seeing and hearing, and he listened, which is more than anyone else ever did. “You’re clairvoyant,” he told me, and I always remembered that; he probably knew less than nothing about it, but he listened and said I was clairvoyant; later he told my mother I ought to be taken to some special clinic and examined, and for about three days she decided I was pregnant. I never talked to him again; I wanted to, once in a while, but he never spoke to me after that.
I knew a lot about people, a lot that they never knew I knew, but I never seemed to have much sense, probably because one thing I never really knew was whether what I was doing was real or not.
The house, I later found out, was almost all square. It had three floors and a basement, and neat trim porches on three sides; whoever built that house had either very little imagination or a mind much like mine, because everything was neatly cornered and as near as possible the same size; that is, one door matched the next almost perfectly and where there were doors they were as often as possible right in the middle of the wall, with an equal space on either side of them. The windows were perfectly correct.
When I asked Mrs. Faun later she told me that there were five people renting rooms in the house; I thought it was wrong that they should be an odd number, but since I was the fifth I could hardly protest, and in any case she had only six rooms to rent. On the top floor were a Mr. Brand who was a bookkeeper, and a Mr. Cabot who was, Mrs. Faun believed, in merchandising. On the second floor were old Mrs. Flanner, who kept a bookshop, Mr. Campbell, who was in transit, and me. Mrs. Faun kept the ground floor for herself. “I always wanted it that way,” she told me, “I always used to dream of the time when I could live on the ground floor; I had it planned for years. I always thought the dining room would work out better as a bedroom, and I hated the idea of going upstairs every night and leaving it behind. It’s more comfortable, it’s more convenient, and it’s perfectly safe.”
“Safe?”
“In case of fire. I can get out.”
I may say that in all the time I was in that house I never met Mr. Campbell, who was in transit.
We were a gay crew, I soon discovered. Here I was, with one suitcase and a fur stole and a pocketbook with plenty of money, but old Mrs. Flanner had had her same room for nine years and she had a television set, all her own furniture, including a Chinese lacquer table, purple drapes on the windows, and a silver tea service. Brand and Cabot on the top floor took cocktails in one another’s room every day at six. Mrs. Faun was apt to invite anyone at random to Sunday dinner; she was almost as good a cook as I am. Brand played the cello, and Mrs. Flanner used to sing at one time before her voice cracked. Mrs. Flanner also played the dirtiest game of bridge that Mrs. Faun had ever seen. Brand had a small mustache, Cabot collected Coalport china, Mrs. Faun disliked garlic and consequently never made a decent salad dressing until the day she died; Brand fell over the bottom step of the staircase every night regularly, coming home at five-thirty. He was neither drunk nor clumsy, he never fell over anything else that anyone ever knew of, he never dropped anything or spilled anything, but every night at five-thirty Mr. Brand tripped over the bottom step of the staircase. You could set your clock by Brand falling over the bottom step of the staircase, Mrs. Faun used to say, if it was important to you to set your clock at five-thirty. Brand and Cabot and Flanner and I usually took most of our meals at a little restaurant around the corner, but every Friday night Brand went to his mother’s and every Saturday night Cabot took out a girl; he had been taking her out for four years now, Mrs. Faun said, but thought marriage was too confining. I liked Mrs. Faun. I had almost nothing to do, so I got to helping with the housework and we’d knock off and sit around the kitchen drinking coffee and eating cookies; Mrs. Faun baked every second morning, before anyone was up, and one thing I did like about living in that house was waking up to the smell of cookies baking.
My room, as I say, was absolutely, perfectly square; I measured it. I admire a house with a good square room, and when I unpacked I knew I was going to stay. First I unpacked my picture, my painting; it had been painted with Hughie’s paints but I painted it myself. “Keep it around if you like,” Hughie said, “you’re proud of it, all right. Don’t think I hate all painting styles but my own.” So my own painting went on the wall, although Mrs. Faun said that it would cost to repair the hole. Cabot liked my painting, and Brand. Mrs. Flanner poked it with her finger and said it took her back. Mrs. Faun said it would cost to repair the hole.
“What do you do, Mrs. Motorman?” Brand asked me.
“A little shoplifting, sometimes,” I told him. “Some meddling.”
“What brought you to our city?”
“Curiosity,” I told him.
Brand and Cabot asked me up for cocktails, and Mrs. Faun asked me for Sunday dinner, and Mrs. Flanner asked me if I played bridge and I said no. I walked to the end of Smith Street and around in the little park, under the trees. One day I went back to the streetcar and got on and went into the center of the city, where I went into the first large store and looked at blouses.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
