“Ditch them?”
Rita turned to look at her. Her face was tanned and square-jawed; her heavy black eyebrows were slightly raised.
“But suppose they told us what young women used to think about,” Daphne said. “Politics, or feminism, or things like that.”
Rita shook a piece of ivory stationery out of the envelope. Without bothering to unfold it, she read off the phrases that showed themselves: “… tea at Mrs.… wore my new flowered … self belt with covered buckle …”
“Well,” Daphne murmured.
“Ditch them,” Rita told her.
They went back downstairs. Daphne felt like a little fairy person following Rita’s clopping boots. “What I do,” Rita said, “is sort everything into three piles: Keep, Discard, and Query. I make it a practice to query as little as possible. Everything we keep I organize, and what’s discarded I haul away; I’ve got my own truck and two guys to help tote. I charge by the hour, but I generally know ahead of time how long a job will run me. This place, for instance—well, I’ll need to sit down and figure it out, but offhand I’d say if I start tomorrow morning, I could be done late Thursday.”
“Thursday! That’s just three days!”
“Or four at the most. It’s a fairly straightforward house, compared to some I’ve seen.”
They were back in the kitchen now. She opened one of the cabinets and gazed meditatively at a collection of empty peanut butter jars.
“It doesn’t look so straightforward to me,” Daphne told her.
“Well, naturally. That’s because you live here. You feel guilty getting rid of things. This one old lady I had, she could never throw out a gift. A drawing her son made in nursery school—and that son was sixty years old! A seashell her girlfriend brought from Miami in nineteen twenty—‘I just feel I’d be throwing the person out,’ she told me. So what I did was, I didn’t let her know. Well, of course she knew in a way. What did she suppose was in all those garbage bags? But she never asked, and I never said, and everyone was happy.”
She slammed the cabinet door shut. “I’ve seen houses so full you couldn’t walk through them. I’ve seen closets totally lost—I mean crammed to the gills and closed off, with new stuff piled in front of them so you didn’t know they existed.”
“Your own apartment must be neat as a pin,” Daphne said.
“Not really,” Rita told her. “That Nick saves everything. I would end up with a pack rat!” She laughed. She hooked a kitchen chair with the toe of her boot, pulled it out from the table, and sat down. “Now,” she said, drawing a pencil and a note pad from her breast pocket. The pencil was roughly the size of a cartridge. She licked its tip and started writing. “Six rooms plus basement plus finished attic. Your attic’s in pretty good shape, but that basement …”
Ian appeared at the back door, lugging a large cardboard box. “Open up!” he called through the glass, and when Daphne obeyed he practically fell inside. Whatever he was carrying must weigh a ton. “Genuine ceramic tiles,” he told Daphne, setting the box on the floor. “We’re replacing an antique mantel at a house in Fells Point and these were just being thrown out, so—”
“Will you be putting them to use within the next ten days?” Rita asked.
He straightened and said, “Pardon?”
“Ian, this is Rita diCarlo,” Daphne said. “My uncle Ian. Rita’s here to organize us.”
“Oh, yes,” Ian said.
“Do you have a specific bathroom in mind that’s in need of those tiles within the next ten days?” Rita asked him.
“Well, not exactly, but—”
“Then I suggest you walk them straight back out to the trash can,” she said, “or else I’ll have to tack them onto my estimate here.”
“But these are from Spain,” Ian told her. He bent to lift one from the box—a geometric design of turquoise and royal blue. “How could I put something like this in the trash?”
Rita considered him. She didn’t give the tile so much as a glance, but Ian continued holding it hopefully in front of his chest like someone displaying his number for a mug shot.
“You see what I have to deal with,” Daphne told Rita.
“Yes, I see,” Rita said.
Oddly enough, though, Daphne just then noticed how beautiful that tile really was. The design looked kaleidoscopic—almost capable of movement. She couldn’t remember now why stripping the house had seemed like such a good idea.
Rita did do an excellent job, as it turned out, but Daphne hardly had time to notice before something new came along for her to think about: Friday afternoon, she was fired.
It wasn’t entirely unexpected. Ever since she’d got her raise, she seemed to have lost interest in her work. She had shown up late, left early, and mislaid several orders. The messages people sent with their flowers had begun to depress her. “Well, I think I’ll say … well, let me see,” they would tell her, frowning into space. “Why don’t we put … Okay! I’ve got it! ‘Congratulations and best wishes.’ ” Then Daphne would slash CBW across the order form. “To the girl of my dreams” was G/dms. “Thanks for last night,” Tx/nite. She felt injured on their behalf—that their most heartfelt sentiments could be considered so routine. And when they were not routine, it was worse: I am more sorry than I can tell you and you’re right not to want to see me again but I’ll never forget you as long as I live and I hope you have a wonderful marriage. “With delivery that comes to twenty-seven eighty,” she would say in her blandest tone.
The way Mr. Potoski put it was, she could either leave now or stay on for her two weeks’ notice, but she could see he was eager to get rid of her. He already had a new girl lined up. “I’ll leave now,” Daphne told him, and so at closing time she gathered her few possessions and stuffed them into a paper sack. Then she slipped her jacket on and ducked quietly out the door, avoiding an awkward farewell scene. On the way to the bus stop she found herself composing messages to Mr. Potoski. Tx/fun: Thanks, it’s been fun. TK: Take care. Not that she had anything against Mr. Potoski personally. She knew this was all her own fault.
Her bus was undergoing some heater problems, and by the time she reached home she was chilled through. Still in her jacket, she went directly to the kitchen and lit the gas beneath the kettle. Ian must be working late this evening. She could hear her grandfather down in the basement, rattling tools and thinking aloud, but she didn’t call out to him. Maybe there was some advantage to living alone after all—not dealing with other people, not feeling responsible for other people’s happiness. Although that was out of the question, now that she had no salary.
She took a mug from the cupboard, where everything sat in straight rows—eight mugs, eight short glasses, eight tall glasses. The mugs that didn’t match and the odd-sized glasses had been sent to Good Works. The cereals that people had tried once and never again had disappeared from the shelves. In just three days Rita had turned this house into a sort of sample kit: one perfect set of everything. But Daphne hadn’t quite adjusted yet and she felt a little rustle of panic. She wanted some extras. She wanted that crowd of cracked, crazed, chipped, handleless mugs waiting behind the other mugs on the off chance they might be needed.
She ladled coffee into the drip pot and then poured in the boiling water. Coffee was her weakness. Reverend Emmett said coffee clouded the senses, coffee stepped between God and the self; but Daphne had discovered long ago that coffee sharpened the senses, and she loved to sit through church all elated and jangly-nerved and keyed to the sound of that inner voice saying enigmatic things she might someday figure out when she was wiser: if not for you, if not for you, if not for you and down in the meadow where the green grass grows … She waited daily for caffeine to be declared illegal, but it seemed the government had not caught on yet.
She poured the coffee and sat down at the table with it, warming her hands around the mug. Now her grandfather’s footsteps climbed the basement stairs and crossed the pantry. Daphne looked up, but the figure in the doorway was no
t her grandfather after all. It was Rita. Daphne said, “Rita! Aren’t you done with us?”
Well, she was done. She had finished yesterday afternoon and even presented her staggeringly high bill, which Daphne was going to mail on to Agatha as soon as she figured out where the stamps had been moved to. But here Rita stood, flushed from her climb, looking a bit better put together than usual in a flowing white shirt that bloused above her jeans and a tan suede jacket as soft as washed silk. “Daphne,” she said flatly. “I thought you were Ian.”
Ah.
Daphne had been through this any number of times. Back in high school, girlfriends of hers showed up unannounced, wearing brand new outfits and carrying their bosoms ostentatiously far in front of them like fruit on a tray. “Oh,” they’d say in just such a tone, dull and disappointed. “I thought you were Ian.”
But Rita already had somebody, didn’t she? She was living with Nick Bascomb. Wasn’t she?
“It just occurred to me,” Rita said, “that I ought to try once more to sort out your grandpa’s workbench. Not that I’d charge any extra, of course. But I didn’t feel right allowing it to stay so …”
Her voice dwindled away. Daphne, sitting back in her chair and cupping her mug in both hands, watched her with some enjoyment. Rita diCarlo, of all people! Such a tough cookie. Although Daphne could have warned her that she was about as far from Ian’s type as a woman could get.
“But it seems your grandpa’s sticking to his guns,” Rita said finally.
“Yes,” Daphne said. She took a sip from her mug.
“So I’ll be going, I guess.”
“Okay.”
In another mood, she might at least have offered coffee. But she had troubles of her own right now, and so she let Rita see herself out.
Daphne started reading the want ads over breakfast every morning. A waste of time. “What is this?” she asked her grandfather. “A city where nobody needs anything?”
“Maybe you should try an agency,” he said.
When it came to unemployment, he was her best listener. Ian always said, “Oh, something will show up,” but her grandfather had been through the Depression and he sympathized from the bottom of his heart every time she was fired. “You might want to think about the Postal Service,” he told her now. “Your dad found the Postal Service very satisfactory. Security, stability, fringe benefits …”
“I do like outdoor exercise,” Daphne mused.
“No, no, not a mailman,” her grandfather said. “I meant something behind a desk.”
She hated desk work. She sighed so hard she rattled her newspaper.
In the afternoons she would take a bus downtown to look in person—“pounding the pavement,” she called it, thinking again of her grandfather’s Depression days. She gazed in the windows of photographic studios, stationery printers, record shops. A record shop might be fun. She knew everything there was to know about the current groups. However, if customers asked her assistance with something classical like Led Zeppelin or the Doors, she’d be in trouble.
Thomas told her she ought to come to New York. She phoned him just to talk, one evening when she felt low, and he said, “Catch the next train up. Sleep on the couch till you land a job. Angie says so too.” (Angie was his girlfriend, who had recently moved in with him although Ian and their grandfather were not supposed to know.) But Daphne couldn’t imagine living in a city where everyone came from someplace else, and so she said, “Oh, I guess I’ll keep looking here.”
One Sunday she even phoned Agatha—not something she did often, since Agatha was hard to reach and also (face it) inclined to criticize. But on this occasion she was a dear. She said, “Daph, what would you think about going to college now? I’d be happy to pay for it. We’re making all this money that we’re too busy to spend. You wouldn’t have to ask Ian for a cent.”
“Well, thank you,” Daphne said. “That’s really nice of you.”
She wasn’t the school type, to be honest. But it felt good to know both her brother and sister were behind her. Her friends were more callous; they were hunting jobs themselves, many of them, or waitressing or tending bar till they decided what interested them, or heading off to law school just to appear busy. Nobody in her circle seemed to have an actual career.
At the start of her third week without work, her grandfather talked her into going to a place called Same Day Résumé. He’d heard it advertised on the radio; he thought it might help her “present” herself, he said. So Daphne took a bus downtown and spoke to a bored-looking man at an enormous metal desk. The calendar on the wall behind him read TUES 13, which made her nervous because an old boyfriend had once told her that in Cuba, Tuesday the thirteenth was considered unlucky. Shouldn’t she just offer some excuse and come back another time? It did seem the man wore a faint sneer as he listened to her qualifications. In fact the whole experience was so demoralizing that as soon as she’d finished answering his questions she walked over to Lexington Market and treated herself to a combination beef-and-bean burrito. Then she went to a matinee starring Cher, her favorite movie star, and after that she cruised a few thrift shops. She bought two sets of thermal underwear with hardly any stains and a purple cotton tank top for a total of three dollars. By then it was time to collect her résumé, which had miraculously become four pages long. She had only to glance through it, though, to see how it had been padded and embroidered. Also, it cost a fortune. Her grandfather had said he would pay, but even so she resented the cost.
All the good cheer she had built up so carefully over the afternoon began to evaporate, and instead of heading home for supper she stopped at a bar where she and her friends hung out on weekends. It gave off the damp, bitter smell that such places always have before they fill up for the evening, and the low lighting seemed not romantic but bleak. Still, she perched on a cracked vinyl stool and ordered a Miller’s, which she drank very fast. Then she ordered another and started reading her résumé. Any four-year-old could see that she hadn’t gone past high school, even if she did list an introductory drawing course at the Maryland Institute and a weekend seminar called New Directions for Women.
“Hello, Daphne,” someone said.
She turned and found Rita diCarlo settling on the stool next to her, unbuttoning her lumber jacket as she hailed the bartender. “Pabst,” she told him. She unwound a wool scarf from her neck and flung her hair back. “You waiting for someone?”
Daphne shook her head.
“Me neither,” Rita said.
Daphne could have guessed as much from Rita’s shapeless black T-shirt and paint-spattered jeans. Her hair was even scruffier than usual; actual dust balls trailed from the end of her braid.
“I had my least favorite kind of job today,” Rita told her. “A divorce. Splitting up a household. Naturally the wife and husband had to be there, so they could offer their opinions.” She accepted her beer and blew into the foam. “And they did have opinions, believe me.”
“Too many jobs get too personal,” Daphne said gloomily.
“Right,” Rita said. She was digging through her pockets for something—a Kleenex. She blew her nose with a honking sound.
“Like this florist’s I was just fired from,” Daphne said. “Everybody’s private messages: you have to write them down pretending not to know English. Or when I worked at Camera Carousel—those photos of girls in bikinis and people’s awful prom nights. You hand over the envelope with this smile like you never even noticed.”
“Look,” Rita said. “Did Ian tell you he and I have been seeing each other?”
“You have?” Daphne asked.
“Well, a couple of times. Well, really just once. I guess you wouldn’t count when I accidentally on purpose ran into him at the wood shop.”
No, Daphne wouldn’t count that.
“I went to Brant’s Custom Woodworks and ordered myself a bureau,” Rita told her.
“I don’t believe he mentioned it.”
“Do you have any idea how much th
ose things cost?”
“Expensive, huh?” Daphne said.
She glanced again at her résumé. Page two: Previous Employment. Here the facts were not padded but streamlined, for the man had suggested that too long a list made a person look flighty. “What say we strike the framer’s,” he had said, his sneer growing more pronounced.
“Another example is picture framing,” Daphne told Rita. “People bring in these poor little paintings they’ve done themselves, or their drawings with the mouths erased and redrawn a dozen times and the hands posed out of sight because they can’t do hands, and all you say is, ‘Let me see now, perhaps a double mat …’ ”
“Then after we talked about my bureau awhile I asked if he’d come look at my apartment,” Rita said, “just so he’d have an idea of the scale.”
Daphne pulled her eyes away from the résumé. She focused on Rita’s face for a moment, and then she said, “Don’t you live with Nick Bascomb?”
“Well, I did, but I made him move out,” Rita said.
“Oh? When was this?”
“Wednesday,” Rita said.
“Wednesday? You mean this Wednesday just past?”
“See,” Rita said, “Monday I went to visit Ian at the wood shop, and that night I asked Nick to move out. But I let him stay till Wednesday because he needed time to get his things together.”
“Decent of you,” Daphne said dryly.
“So then Friday Ian came by and we settled on what size bureau I wanted. I invited him to supper, but he said you-all were expecting him at home.”
Daphne tried to remember back to Friday. Had she been there, even? She might have gone out with her usual gang and forgotten supper altogether.
“So when was it you saw him the second time?” she asked Rita.
“Well, that was it. Friday.”
“You mean the second time was when he came to measure for your bureau?”
“Well, yes.”