Against the Season Read online

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” Cole said. “I’m sorry.”

  “So we’re sorry, but I’m serious about those diaries.”

  “Agate, I just wouldn’t dream of telling Cousin A what to do about something like that. I mean, she’s like my grandmother. Maybe it’s different for you. You take care of her; you can say different sorts of things to her. You don’t seem to worry about what you say.”

  “Maybe sometimes I should. Diplomacy isn’t my strong suit. It’s not a matter of telling her what to do but giving her the idea that she ought to get rid of them somehow.”

  “Maybe Harriet could,” Cole said. “Maybe you should talk to Harriet.”

  “Wouldn’t you talk to her? You know her. I don’t really, and I’m supposed to be just the maid around here.”

  “But you see her,” Cole said. “I haven’t seen her since I started work.”

  “Okay, I’ll try.”

  Cole hadn’t moved from the door, though he was more relaxed, leaning with his hands behind his back, braced on the doorknob.

  “Oh, another thing,” Agate said. “I thought I ought to get some clothes, something to fit the two of us.”

  Cole blushed as he said, “There are some uniforms in your closet that…”

  “I’m not really the uniform type. I wondered if you’d be around Saturday afternoon so that I could go into town.”

  “Sure.”

  “What are you so bloody nervous about?”

  “I… I don’t think you should be in my room. I…”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t mean anything. I just mean it probably doesn’t look…”

  “Who’s looking?”

  “Just because I care, just because I want to do the right thing…”

  “You’re a refreshing change,” Agate said in a virtuous tone totally unlike her own, “for a poor girl like me so used to being taken advantage of.”

  “Don’t make fun of me!”

  “Why not? You’re funny. I’m not going to rape you, I promise, though I’d be doing you a favor.”

  As Agate got up off the bed, Cole opened the door. Then, as she was going through it, he said, “I just don’t know how to joke. I don’t know how to kid around.”

  “Don’t worry about it. The straight man always gets the laughs anyway.”

  Agate went back down to the kitchen to clear away the supper dishes. Cole didn’t have the guts to be a faggot, just to worry about it. Why shouldn’t she bait him? Bastard! Prick the size of a jelly bean!

  “Often men with smaller than normal sexual organs, because of a sense of inadequacy, turn to members of their own sex…” Cole had read in a secluded corner of the library, and he remembered it now as he looked down at his own erection, unable to judge, since he had always been shy in public toilets and gym showers, since he had not been in the army, whether he was smaller than normal or not. Nowhere had he ever found simple statistics. So what good had it done to take Cousin A’s measuring tape from her sewing basket? None. “Faggot.” Cole could still feel the pressure of Panayotis’ cock in the cavity between his ribs. And it was to that memory he masturbated, canceling out Agate’s widespread thighs which had so recently threatened his bed.

  Agate, similarly rejected, hadn’t the energy or imaginative patience for such relief. Even her anger could not sustain itself for long. She never had attracted “nice” boys who, when their appetites finally moved them past their courage, chose less ample mountings than her own. The men who wanted Agate were those who had already made the mistake of marrying those tight, compact little cunts, more designed for jackhammers than human flesh. And showing them what they had missed and would continue to miss had its pleasures. Agate never took a man more than three or four times, just long enough for it to be really good. On the form she could be honest when she said she did not know who the father was. She could only be sure that he had fathered before, that no green seed grew in her now. Some comfort? Some. But she felt heavy, slovenly, sad, as she climbed the front stairs to Miss A’s room.

  “Tired tonight, Agate?” Amelia asked, looking up from the evening paper.

  “Full of life,” Agate answered.

  “Sit down a minute. Sit here.” Amelia indicated a chair that was right beside the bed.

  “I thought maybe you’d like something to drink.”

  “Not just now.”

  When Agate sat, Amelia reached over and took her hand. Agate looked down at the old hand over hers, joints swollen, liver spots stretched on the tight, sore skin. Where did the comfort come from out of all that unspoken pain? Awkward to sit there, her jeans straining like an outgrown skin of her own, her breasts straining against the inadequate hammocks of her bra, her elbow straining back to leave her hand where it had been taken.

  “You’re a comfort to me, Agate, a real comfort.”

  She was not going to bawl like a kid. She simply was not.

  “I’ve got to be some comfort to myself pretty soon,” Agate said. “I’m going to go downtown and buy me some tents. Not uniforms. Tents. Bright ones.”

  “Go to Harden’s and charge them to me.”

  “Nope. I’ve got to spend all this money I’m making on something.”

  “Why not save it?”

  “I don’t need it. I never have.”

  XI

  “FELLER WISHES I WOULDN’T be seen by myself at Nick’s. By myself means not with him. Feller wishes I’d find something constructive to do. Other women get themselves involved in church groups or charitable organizations. Rosemary Hopwood won’t let a pregnant girl in the same block with me. Is she jealous? I could at least be a den mother. Cubs! As if my own three didn’t gnaw at my bones enough now. At least, Feller says, I could stay home more often in the evening. To watch him get a hard on over his court cases or dividends and then want to take it out on me? I hate men.”

  Grace stamped out a cigarette and looked at Dina, sitting away from her in the armchair.

  “Do I have to get myself a drink?”

  “No,” Dina said, and she got up and took the glass from Grace.

  Grace followed her out into the kitchen.

  “You don’t care whether I live or die. That’s what I like about you. I don’t think you even care whether I keep my clothes on and go home, do you?”

  “No,” Dina said.

  “I don’t either. That’s a fact,”

  “You’re getting drunk.” Dina handed Grace a fresh drink.

  “That’s right.”

  “Why don’t you get something to do?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I said…”

  “Pardon me? Pardon me?”

  Dina shrugged and went back into the living room.

  “I have got something to do,” Grace announced to Dina’s back. “Something very interesting.”

  Dina didn’t respond.

  “But I have to plan it carefully. Take my time about it. I don’t want it just to be uncomfortable for that faggoty bastard. I’m going to see him run out of town.”

  “Your own husband?” Dina asked.

  “No, sweetheart—that cock sucker, Fallidon.”

  “What have you against him?”

  “His money-colored eyes.”

  “He’s a better man than we’d get again in a long time.”

  “Man?”

  “Man,” Dina said.

  “He’s probably being blackmailed by every sailor off that ship.”

  “Why did you tell him you wanted money to invest in my business?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I said…”

  “Pardon me? Pardon me?”

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” Dina said. “There are so many people who could do so much to you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that.”

  “Look, nobody tells Mrs. Feller Hill to bugger off and gets away with it.”

  “Anybody can. I can.”

  “Baby? You aren’t mad at me?” />
  “I’m tired of you,” Dina said.

  “But you’re not mad at me?”

  “I could be.”

  “Please don’t be mad at me. Please.”

  “Then don’t be stupid. Don’t hurt yourself any more.”

  “If I could just have some money. If I could just have a little bit of money …”

  “What you need is a little sense.”

  “I’m nothing but a bloody slave. Just because Feller knows, just because he can hold it over my head…”

  Dina closed her eyes for a moment.

  “You don’t have to worry,” Grace said. “You don’t care anyway, do you?”

  “No.”

  “I could go home right now…”

  “This is the last time,” Dina said.

  “That’s what I say.”

  “And now it’s true.”

  “Doesn’t matter to me.”

  “I know,” Dina said.

  “Or you.”

  “No.”

  Harriet had imagined that, on the night they went out to dinner, she and Peter would talk about it. Then, out of understanding, she would say it was best for them not to see each other. She had worried mainly about how that could be arranged. They would have to telephone each other more often to assure not meeting than they ever had to be together. But they mustn’t go on seeing each other simply because it was easier. What had never occurred to Harriet was that the subject would not come up. At dinner they chatted about everyone else. Then they sat in customary side-by-side absence from each other through a movie. Harriet wasn’t troubled. Over Miss A’s recipe for hot chocolate or something stronger back at her apartment, they would talk. Peter didn’t come in. She could not even tell that he was evading anything. He seemed simply tired.

  “Would you like to take a drive on Sunday, maybe out to the beach? I haven’t been yet this summer,” he’d offered instead.

  “Shall I bring a picnic?”

  So here she was chopping celery, slathering mayonnaise across bread, still dutifully keeping her side of what was no bargain at all.

  “I like your tuna fish sandwiches,” Peter would say.

  “Thank you,” she would answer and then look for something as innocuous to compliment him with. “What a nice place you’ve found for a picnic.”

  He would smile, with his teeth, his potentially grief-stricken eyes uninvolved.

  “Actually they’re seasoned with arsenic, you… heel!”

  If she ever did dare to get angry with him, that would be exactly the trite sort of thing she’d come out with, sitting scrawny-thighed and sharp-elbowed in as apologetic a bathing suit as she could find at Harden’s, which carried nearly nothing but bikinis in her size. “The figure of a girl still,” her mother said, in a tone of dubious surprise. Picturing herself on the beach with Peter, she had an inverted image of the Charles Atlas cartoons: a spindly, nearly breastless woman having sand kicked in her face by 40-26-39, Peter dashing off on muscular, hairy legs after breasts and beach ball.

  But she was a person, not a cartoon. And so was he. If she could only talk to him. Well, she did talk to him. She had told him a lot about her family, her growing up, the books she read. In some ways she talked more easily with Peter than she did with anyone else. And he talked with her, too, told her things about the bank he wouldn’t have told anyone else. He had even spoken several times with a mild, distant bitterness about his mother and sisters. She knew he still sent money home but did not, in other ways, have anything to do with his family. They simply didn’t talk about themselves, having established from the first that there was nothing to say.

  “There is something to say, Peter.”

  “What is that?”

  All the things to be said were, of course, for him to say, and if he wouldn’t, couldn’t, didn’t know, then what could she do?

  “Why don’t you love me?”

  “Because you’re a prissy, bony, dull, no longer young woman…”

  “Those aren’t the real answers, are they? Are they? Am I really stuck with those?”

  All the badly invented conversation. She should be grateful it never did take place.

  Peter was knocking at the door.

  “That’s a pretty dress. Is it new?”

  “You always notice.”

  She wasn’t going to be able to bear it. Not for a whole afternoon, the terrible nourishment to her starved vanity that simply being with him was. Why did he have to be so cruelly good-looking, so markedly polite, so indifferent? But there he was picking up the picnic basket. Then there she was sitting in his car, a rare treat which was being offered for the second time within a week. Crumbs. Birds lived and sang on them. And enjoyed the air.

  “It’s lovely air,” Harriet said.

  “I wish I could remember to enjoy it the way you do.”

  From F Street they turned onto Main and drove along the seawall. There on the walkway was the awkward line of pregnant girls, setting out into the Sunday sky.

  “I wonder how Cole’s getting along with Agate,” Peter said.

  “I think they’re making friends. He helps her a good deal now that she’s nurse as well as cook.”

  “He’s such a self-conscious kid. He reminds me of me at his age.”

  “Were you like that?”

  “Sure. When you don’t have a father to watch or teach you, or when your father doesn’t know even as much about the world as you do, when there isn’t anyone to ask all the stupid questions… Do you know what Cole wanted to know? Where he should eat because Miss Larson was sick in bed.”

  “Poor Cole.”

  “And it is a matter of life and death,” Peter said. “If you don’t learn, you harden into a different sort of hysteria.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You… close out.”

  For fear of making a gross mistake, Harriet did not reply. Was he trying to explain himself? He couldn’t be. He did know where to eat. He had found the answers to all the stupid questions. Was he trying to say something to her then? For certainly she hadn’t learned. And she did close out. She was closing out now. But she didn’t know what else to do.

  “Does this look like a good place?”

  “You always find good places.”

  Now what would she say when he spoke about the sandwiches? She and Cole.

  “Did you bring a suit?” Peter asked, seeing only her towel on the back seat.

  “I have it on underneath.”

  “Oh.”

  “The material they make them of now dries right away.”

  “I guess it does. When I was nine, I had a good case of sitting in wet wool, and I’ll never trust a suit again, no matter what the label says, even if it’s true.”

  Harriet laughed. “I did that, too.”

  “What kids are missing nowadays!”

  Then they were walking along the beach, looking for agates, and Harriet, absorbed in the search for the light-struck clarity of those small stones, forgot that there was anything to be nervous about.

  “There. There’s one,” and she picked it up, brown filtering to amber. “She does have odd eyes, doesn’t she?”

  “Who?” Peter asked.

  “Agate.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “She’s beautiful in a way I’m not used to,” Harriet said. “I’ve never seen anyone like her before.”

  “Vulgar.”

  “Is she?”

  “I think so,” Peter said.

  “But I’d think she came from a good family.”

  “That doesn’t prevent vulgarity, even encourages certain sorts.”

  It was that sort of confidence in him Harriet envied. Nobody from good families here was vulgar, nobody born into them anyway. She saw another agate.

  “There. That’s the color of Dina’s eyes.”

  “Yes,” Peter said, looking… Harriet was about to say the only interesting thing she had to say about Dina, but she remembered, in time, why she shouldn
’t.

  “I wish there were more people in this town like Dina,” Peter said.

  “Oh?”

  “She has real business sense. I wouldn’t be surprised if, before she’s through, she could buy and sell some of the people who treat her as if she were just one step up from the junkman.”

  “Does anyone treat Dina like that?”

  “Sometimes I think all of us do, but she’s too proud to care.”

  A hard judgment, unless you agreed that everyone treated everyone else with some indifference.

  “Is this a good place to stop?” Peter asked.

  “Yes, lovely.”

  She helped him spread the towels and anchor them with rocks. Then she opened the picnic basket and set out sandwiches and fruit, poured the iced tea from the thermos. They sat. Peter picked up the plastic bag from his place and opened it. Harriet watched him look at the sandwich and then bite into it. He chewed carefully and then swallowed.

  “I like your tuna fish sandwiches,” he said.

  “Why don’t you love me, Peter?”

  For once the expression of his mouth and eyes coincided, tense with surprise. Then he said, “You don’t love me, do you?”

  That she should, whether he did or not, had never occurred to her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You’ve never let me try. I mean, you haven’t wanted me to. I’ve tried not to. I don’t know. I want to, but not if…”

  “Not if what?”

  “No,” Harriet said. “That would be as bad a bargain as the one we’ve already made, Isn’t it funny? I never heard that before.”

  “What would be as bad a bargain?”

  “Loving you only if you loved me.”

  “I don’t see why. Loving someone who can’t love you is simply painful.”

  “It’s not a bargain.”

  “Harriet, I do care about you … more than I’ve let you know, perhaps, more than I realized myself until the night you didn’t turn up at the concert. I was terribly worried about you. I found it very painful. That’s all.”

  “What do you mean, that’s all?”

  “I wasn’t relieved when you were all right. I was angry.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to worry, not about anyone.”

  “Well, no, of course not.”

  “I can’t stand it,” Peter said.