Die a Little Read online

  At Bill’s encouragement, Alice and I begin going out for “girls’ nights” once a month. Nights that are at least as much about getting ready—radio moaning, hair spray buffering the air, Alice with needle and thread fitting me into new dresses she’s made from studio-scrapped gossamer—as they are about the destination.

  Having Alice in our life makes me think of what it might have been like to have sisters or close girlfriends. Here we are in our slips and stockings, laughing and running around, cigarettes dangling (only with Alice do I smoke) as we try to get ready. Alice plucks my eyebrows for me, cursing me for what she calls my “crushingly natural arch.”

  One night, Alice is putting delicate finger curls in my hair when she starts to talk about how her mother had the most beautiful mane, like sealskin. Mae Steele née Gamble was dismissed from her place of employment when it was discovered she was eight months pregnant with Alice—a fact she had concealed through increasingly painful physical measures for nearly six months. She’d been a chambermaid for a rich Los Angeles family—“not the Chandlers, but close.”

  Mae confided in her daughter Alice the toil of the job, and the many indignities. Especially, the monthly job of dyeing the woman of the house’s pubic hair. “Once, she asked me if I’d ever done it to myself,” Alice’s mother told her daughter. “I said no, but that I once shaved mine in the shape of a heart for a man. Her jaw dropped to her knees. For about three seconds. And then she decided she liked the idea and she asked me to help her do it. It wasn’t for her husband, of course. The Jap gardener. Who was a big favorite in the neighborhood, let me tell you.

  “Of course, the man who asked me to shave mine was her husband. When he finally saw what she had done, weeks later, he was furious. Because he knew. He knew that I had something over him, that she and I were that close.”

  • • •

  These sidelong revelations, conveyed so casually, and then an hour later we are seated in sparkling, red-hued nightclubs in Hollywood, nights with cigarette after cigarette, cracked crab on silver plates, and maybe one too many Seven & Sevens.

  Three hours later still, my head slung down, chest ringing, I can’t stop the quaking fun house feel, bright pops and tingling sparkles, hand clutching, fist twisting in my belly.

  Suddenly, Alice’s enormous black eyes are looming beside me.

  “Hold on there, darling,” warm and then pealing into a laugh. “Haven’t you ever been tight before?”

  Not like this, I try to say, but the thought of speaking seems unimaginable, Alice’s hand on my neck, in my hair, trying to hold me up like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  “—get you home safe and sound before one of these pretty boys can get his hands on you when my back is turned. Bill will wonder where we—”

  And driving home and lights passing over me and I sit in the passenger seat trying to listen, trying to listen to Alice’s rustling voice. She is telling me how she saw her mother on television the night before, her long dead mother, and had nightmares all night. It was an old musical and she couldn’t remember the name, never remembered the names. As Alice watched the movie, her mother’s face suddenly popped out of a row of dancing girls in satin bathing suits. “Like some horrible jack-in-the-box.” She laughs, her voice rising, quavering uncomfortably.

  “This was in the early thirties, before she hung it all up. She couldn’t keep up with her union dues, and there were other problems, too.” Alice’s voice jingles in my ears, and I try to concentrate, try to hold on to her words, the secrets she may be revealing.

  “She moved us out to Hermosa Beach and laid low for several months before getting her maid job. Hard times, and no one suffered more than that woman. At everyone’s hands, but especially her own.”

  She pauses, looks out the window into the hills, eyes heavy with dread. Then adds, “If she’d had more of a taste for pleasure, like her husband, she’d have been better off.”

  Then adds, “Did you know. She committed suicide by eating ant paste.”

  Then, “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she confides with a ghost of a smile, leaning over as we pull into the driveway, mouth nearly to my ear, “but it wasn’t soon enough.”

  For two months, we all fall into an easy schedule. Alice and I carpooling to school. Thursday night dinners. Sundays spent at my brother’s, ending with a big Sunday dinner. Sometimes, bowling on Fridays. A double date. The main difference is I spend more time with Alice and almost never see Bill alone for more than a few minutes. It is jarring at first, but I know that it is only natural. They are newlyweds. And Alice is working so hard to make a home.

  During the school day, if I have a free period, I sometimes walk by Alice’s classroom, just to see. Occasionally, I notice a faraway look in her eyes as she teaches. She is very present, talking seamlessly, directing everything. But her eyes are slick, silver things not connecting to anything, just hanging there, unfixed. And sometimes her body starts to look that way, too. Not tight and taut and jumping like usual, but loose, with slow and elongated movements, punctuated by hands touching everything lightly, running along the sewing machines, sliding along the windowsill, passing over the girls’ shoulders, touching everything, but only faintly, fleetingly, like a ghost.

  It reminds me of my days volunteering at the county hospital, and the way some patients would always touch you, and the touch was warm and slippery and the morphine tanks dripped endlessly, endlessly.

  • • •

  “Don’t you ever get tired of it?” Alice is smoking and driving with equal intensity. It is a bright Monday morning.

  “Of what?”

  “Of having to be at school. Of having to be in front of them, of having them come up to your desk, in the hallways, in the cafeteria. Always wanting to talk to you. And then, the other teachers, always talking about their classes, about lesson plans, about the students, about the principal, about faculty meetings and curriculum. All the time. All day long.”

  I wave her smoke out of my face and say, “Well, it’s the nature of the job. Everyone takes these jobs, chooses teaching because they do care, right?”

  She looks at me, blowing smoke from her lower lip and smiling faintly. “I notice you didn’t say ‘we.’ ”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You didn’t say, ‘We take these jobs because we care.’ ”

  “I was speaking generally,” I say.

  She doesn’t say anything, her eyes darting at the traffic. I can’t tell if she is thinking of a response, or if she’s already moved on.

  “I’ve always known I was going to be a teacher,” I add.

  She nods vaguely, hitting her horn lightly as a car threatens to force its way into her lane.

  “You’ll get used to it,” I say.

  “You’ll come to enjoy it,” I continue. “Truly. You’ll come around.”

  I can’t stop talking. Somehow, it’s me now who can’t stop.

  The sense always that there is a ticking time bomb . . . and then, quite suddenly, it seems to be ticking faster.

  It is a month or so before final exams, and I’m in the main office, where the attendance secretary is helping me track down an errant student.

  “Don’t take it personally, Miss King.” She clucks her tongue. “Peggy’s been missing all of her classes. We’re going to have to call her mother.”

  “All right,” I say. As I turn, I collide with Principal Evans, his vested chest nearly knocking me down.

  “I thought I heard you, Miss King,” he says. “Come into my office for a moment, will you?”

  He opens the door for me with his usual formality.

  “Have a seat. I have a small favor to ask.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When we hired your sister—”

  “Sister-in-law.”

  “Sister-in-law. When we hired her last fall it was under the precondition—the state-dictated precondition—that we would receive a copy of her certification from . . . what was it . . .” He began
thumbing through the file in front of him.

  “Van Nuys Community College,” he reads aloud, then looks up at me, over his reading glasses.

  “Right.”

  “Well, somehow we never received the paperwork from Van Nuys. Or from Lomita, where she taught for . . . a semester.”

  “Really.” I want to be more surprised than I am.

  “I’m sure it’s merely an oversight.” He smiles serenely.

  “I’m sure. Why—may I ask, why are you asking me and not Mrs. King herself?”

  “Well, you see, I didn’t want her to feel we doubt her,” he says. “She’s very sensitive, you know. A fairly green teacher.”

  “I see. I’ll be sure to bring it up with her.”

  “And I’d hoped to take care of it today, because I have a lunch meeting Wednesday with the superintendent about next year’s renewals. Do you know, will she be back tomorrow?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Well, I might have broached the subject with Mrs. King herself, delicately, but her illness—”

  “Illness?” Alice had seemed fine when we drove to school that morning.

  “Oh, I assumed you generally drove in together. She’s out sick today. Apparently some sort of flu.”

  “Right,” I say, rising. “I’ll speak with her tonight.”

  “Righto.”

  As I walk out, head suddenly throbbing, I try to guess at what point Alice might have slipped out of school. At what point she gave up her pretense of coming to work and drove away. Perhaps she felt ill once she arrived.

  “Miss Harris, have you seen Mrs. King today?”

  “No, no,” she says, thumbing through her card file. “She called in sick.” She waves a card in front of me. “She phoned when I first arrived, seven A.M.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  That night, I call my brother to tell him about the missing paperwork. I speak to him in simple, even tones, trying to keep my voice free from any concern or doubt or judgment.

  Like the detective he is, he asks a series of questions I am in no position to answer, questions about how the school or the college must have bungled the process, why he and Alice hadn’t been told sooner. Then, he assures me that he will take care of it.

  “There must have been some mistake, some kind of filing error or something,” he says, and even over the phone I can somehow see his brow wrinkled in a gesture so old it seems timeless.

  “Don’t worry,” he says, for the third time.

  “I’m not worried, Bill.”

  “I’ll drive to Van Nuys myself if necessary,” he adds.

  “Fine. How was work—”

  “—Gee, I wish they’d called me sooner. Evans, I mean. I hate for him to think . . . I want everything to go smoothly.”

  “Is Alice there now?” I ask, as casually as I can manage.

  “No, she’s out. She’s got some meeting. A neighborhood thing, I guess. Couldn’t be school-related, or you’d be there, too, right?” he says, and I’m not sure if it is a question or not.

  “Right,” I say, deciding, in an instant, not to bring up that Alice had left school before it began. I don’t know why I don’t tell him. Something in his voice. Instead, the revelation hovers in my throat, too momentous to spill forward. I say nothing.

  Then, not a week later, the next head-jerking puzzle.

  I am walking into the home ec lab to meet up with Alice for our carpool home. The cavernous room, with its half dozen kitchen units for students to practice making beef bourguignon, is dark, lit only by faint late-afternoon sun. Past the kitchenettes and through the set of sewing machines, I can see Alice standing in front of her desk, my view partially obstructed by sewing dummies.

  I pause for a second, because I think I hear her speaking to someone and I wonder if it is a student she might be reprimanding, or counseling, and I don’t want to interrupt.

  Quickly, however, I can see she is distraught in a way she wouldn’t be with a student. The low murmuring becomes more fervent. I step slightly to my side and see the profile of a man leaning against the edge of her desk, facing her. The dark furrow of his brows juts out, and as I inch closer, I can see the edges of a steel blue sharkskin suit.

  “Well, how would I know she wasn’t going to go through with it? I only know what she told me.”

  Then, the deep, indecipherable tones of the man. Then, her again:

  “Did she give you the rest? I told her not to do it. I knew it would turn out this way.”

  She raises the back of her hand to her forehead. I twist around one of the kitchen counters and see him. He doesn’t move at all as they speak, but she moves constantly, winds her arms around herself, scuffing her heels on the floor anxiously.

  “She’s digging her own grave as far as I’m concerned. That’s his story, anyway. I can’t promise anything, but she knows better. Christ.”

  Her head bobs wildly. I still can’t hear him, even as I pass the kitchen units and near the sewing machines, about twenty feet from them. He never moves at all, so still, issuing the low tones of confidence and placidity.

  “Christ, why do you think she . . . damn it, anyway. Well, she’s made her bed and now . . .”

  Alice’s foot taps staccato, and suddenly she looks up from her own frantic tapping to the man. He meets her gaze, and then, as if feeling my struck gaze upon him, looks over to me.

  “Hello there,” he says calmly, pausing a cool, languorous moment before moving out of his leaning slouch and standing upright. The eyes are the thing— like a Chinaman’s. The heaviest lids you ever saw, barely any pupil can squeak through. Cushiony lids and puffy lower rims unbalanced by angular black brows.

  Alice’s head turns suddenly, jarringly to me, her eyes wide and glassy. Then she quickly smiles and runs over.

  “Oh, honey, Lora,” she coos sweetly, and with surprising sincerity. “Let me introduce you.” She hurries over to me, grabs my hands in her frosty ones, and tugs me back with her.

  The man, hat in one hand, holds out his other toward me. “Good to meet you, Miss King. I’ve heard . . .” He trails off, touching his mouth to my hand, fingertips touching the back of my wrist so fleetingly I wonder if I imagine it.

  “This is an old friend,” Alice says, tugging at the sleeves of her dress and standing very straight.

  “Oh?” I say politely, taking my hand back and burying it safely in my dress pocket.

  “I know Alice from when she was a little girl with curlicues and pantaloons.” He winks at me, eyes, face impenetrable, voice soft and low. Utterly unreadable. Is he teasing? Is he lying? Is he sharing a sweet truth?

  “Family friends?” I find myself asking, when no one says anything.

  “You could say. Seems we’ve always known each other.” A soft pause and a long arm out to Alice’s shoulder as Alice smiles indecipherably. “But I’ve been living in Mexico for a while.”

  “But you’re back now.” Alice looks up at him. “Isn’t it wonderful that you’re back? Make new friends but keep the old, as they say.”

  Alice wrings her hands and rubs at her watch, pretending not to look at the time, and then abruptly, broadly, she does look, as if in a stage gesture.

  “Oh, Lora, it’s late, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Should we go?”

  Alice nods anxiously and grabs her purse and gloves from the desk, navigating her way behind him.

  “I never did get your name,” I find myself asking.

  “Joe Avalon,” he says serenely, putting on his French gray felt hat. “Miss King, the pleasure has been mine.”

  • • •

  In the car afterward, Alice chatters away about her troublesome fifth-period class, about Nancy Turner, who is going to perform a monologue at the state drama competition, about the Handler girl with the dirty neck whose mother seems to have left town with a marine. She unleashes a stream of talk the likes of which I haven’t heard since the night I first met her. A long rant filled with comments, thoughts
, and questions for which she leaves no room for answers. Finally, “Isn’t he the nicest fellow? He’s an old family friend and he’s always helped me out of jams. He just always seems to turn up when I’m in trouble, and for that, I’ll always be grateful to him.”

  “So you’re in trouble now?” I ask, turning the steering wheel as we enter their drive.

  “No, no, of course not. I didn’t mean now. Just in the past, things I owe him for. Not that he expects more than a thanks. But I say it all just to suggest what a fine fellow he is. My friend Maureen, who dated him for a while, used to say, ‘a stand-up guy.’ That’s what he is. Though I’m sure you couldn’t tell that from the quick exchange, but even though he looks a little . . . you know, he’s really the kindest man you’ll ever meet. I should have him over for dinner some night now that he’s back in town. I’d really like Bill to meet him. They’d get along like a house on fire, I know. Don’t you think? Well, maybe not. Oh, here we are.”

  And I remember this: a slow, slow turn of her head from me to the house. I remember it occurring in actual slow motion, dragged out, and her head turned and her lit, blazing eyes transforming instantly into coal weights, her face a slow, pale blur studded with heavy, inkblot eyes turning to the house, turning and turning off like a windup toy shutting down and shut . . . ting . . . off.

  • • •

  That night in my apartment, and other nights, too, burrowed under the covers, I watch the shadows on the wall and think of meeting men, meeting men like in movies, and meeting men like Alice and her mysterious friends seem to—seem to at least in Alice’s stories—men met on buses between stops, in the frozen foods aisle, at Woolworth’s when buying a spool of thread, at the newsstand, perusing Look, in hotel lobbies, at supper clubs, while hailing cabs or looking in shop windows. Men with smooth felt hats and pencil mustaches, men with Arrow shirts and shiny hair, men eager to rush ahead for the doors and to steady your arm as you step over a wet patch on the road, men with umbrellas just when you need them, men who hold you up with a firm grip as the bus lurches before you can reach a seat, men with flickering eyes who seem to know just which coat you are trying to reach off the rack in the coffee shop, men with smooth cheeks smelling of tangy lime aftershave who would order you a gin and soda before you even knew you wanted one.