“I’ve never been married,” Claudette said, feeling her ears go hot. “I mean, it just hasn’t happened.”
Eileen leaned back with her wide brown eyes and said, “You, dear? Some lucky man is going to snatch you right up.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Claudette said, speaking too quickly, rushing it again.
A look of concern troubled Eileen’s face. The restaurant was mostly empty and Phil was shaking the transistor radio again and the fan was going and the coffee urn in Claudette’s hand felt heavy and a pair of colored women from Eileen’s church came through the parking lot in earnest conversation and the man two tables down pushed his empty plate out to the edge and cleared his throat and Eileen said, “I understand, dear. It’s nothing to worry about.”
That night in bed she thought about their conversation and a dozen quips she could have used to make light of the situation, terrified she’d said something she had always wanted not to say, or by not saying it, she’d said to Eileen just the opposite. Whether it was one or the other, she couldn’t tell, couldn’t discover in herself the proper angle, the entry point, the set of words she would need to clear it all up. She told herself she couldn’t be too careful. Once last autumn a pair of women sat in the corner booth with books they talked over, animatedly, for an hour after finishing their meal. She’d liked their comfortable way with each other, their confident voices. She’d liked the way they took turns making each other laugh. And she’d known, of course she’d known, but even then she could never say, and what business would it have been of theirs—really, what business at all? Rolling around, unsleeping and wild, the only thing she could hold to was that she was positive Eileen felt something, too, a silent secret between them, even if she would never in a million years do anything about it. She knew from their walks and her laughter and her eyes and the way Eileen touched her on the back of the arm for no reason but affection, knew from the interest she had taken in her, this waitress beached in a little town halfway to Los Angeles, no longer speaking to her parents, her apartment behind old lady Markel’s house, her car a dented Buick so old she worried the city might tow it away as junk when she wasn’t looking.
But the next day, as she tied on her apron, just before the lunch crowd began sauntering in, Eileen entered, her hair done up in a little yellow bonnet to match her dress, a pink shawl over her shoulders. She waved and took her usual seat, hours early, and Phil grabbed Claudette by the elbow and said, his breath like a cigarette rolled in old bacon, “Your friend there’s gone off her rocker. This ain’t the damn fireman’s ball.”
“She just likes to look nice,” she said.
He hadn’t let go of her elbow. “I don’t want you talking to her so much.”
“What’s it to you?” she said, and tried pulling her elbow loose. But he was strong and he had a grip on her and his eyes told her to stop pulling and who was in charge and she hated him, hated him something awful. “She’ll want her coffee,” she said. “She’s a paying customer.”
“Just remember who’s paying you,” he said, and let go of her arm. As she walked away, her arm throbbed, and lifting the coffee urn was actually a strain. She turned back, hoping he would have gone on about his business, but he hadn’t, and was instead looking down appreciatively at her legs. That was Phil for you. A regular creep.
The tension in her smile must have been evident, must have been, because as Claudette walked the tile floors toward the back corner booth and Eileen took off her glasses, her magnificent eyes narrowed, and when she said, “My dear, how are you?” a disturbance rang in her voice like the botched note from a piano.
She assured her it was nothing, she was just tired, and that’s when it happened. That’s when Eileen asked her if she was free for dinner after her shift, around eight o’clock. Her yes streamed out ahead of her thoughts.
She had come from San Diego, her father a dentist who in his spare time and with her mother’s sensible eye for accounting had invested in real estate up the coast, making gobs of money and losing little of it during the Depression, having never gone in for stocks, so that by the time Claudette was born in ’32, the family would have seemed to a lot of people to be rolling in crinkly hundred-dollar bills. When she was old enough for school, this had put a chip on every other child’s shoulder: the rich girl from the house on the hill, with all the pretty clothes and a driver and a mother who was pictured nearly every week in the newspaper at this or that ribbon cutting or as the patron of some museum or university, and a perfect snob, the children were all sure, a terrible and perfect snob who deserved to have her face mushed in the dirt. And they did mush her face in the dirt, kick her shins, pass dirty notes about her father falling in love with all his patients. Her only friend in those early years had been Cleo Fontaine, nearly her opposite in every way save how the others reviled them both. Cleo showed up at school with a black eye, picked at the scabs on her knuckles, relished the disdain thrown on her by the girls in their class. She had come in the second grade, the new student, and after the first month of classes, the two were inseparable, banded together, their own line of defense. Together they would sit in the narrow field next to the schoolhouse picking blades of grass from the dry earth, talking about the movies and radio, talking like girls, just talking. When she told Cleo that her mother had named her after the film star Claudette Colbert, her new friend rolled on the grass laughing, then made a joke of pulling up her skirt to show a little leg, just the way Colbert had done in a movie neither of them had seen. Even if the gesture was something they only knew secondhand, it became theirs, and anytime they were already in hysterics, one or the other would send them both into gasping laughter by pulling the move. Then, like a rain that falls overnight when no one is looking, at the beginning of the next school year, Cleo was gone.
By the time the war was over, when Claudette was thirteen, none of those early troubles mattered. She had shown herself to have a talent with writing, a knack for history, and declared that she would one day be a world traveler just like Mrs. Garfield, who taught geography, spent her summers abroad, and though well into her gray hair without a child of her own, said without a lick of unhappiness that her students were her children. Claudette was no longer alone then, or dependent on a single friend. She had a whole group of girlfriends—Sally Munce, Dorothy Wethers, Nan Williams, Margie Nelson—whom she spent all her time with, studying in the afternoons, going to movies on the weekends, and volunteering now and again for the rubber or steel drives. They had sung together as a quintet, with Nan on piano of course, at the school talent show. And so when Father told her she would be sent to a private residential preparatory school north of the city beginning the following year, she rebelled. She said, in fact, that she hated him, that if he’d wanted to send her to private school he should have done so years ago rather than making her endure everything she’d endured, not now, not now that things were what they were. “Endured?” he said, combing at his mustache with his finger, lingering at the bottom of the stairs as she wept. “What on earth have you endured, darling?”
She didn’t explain, not then or in the months after, and didn’t complain again even when her crate was packed and her goodbyes goodbyed. At St. Anne’s, she wore her black and white uniform, she attended classes and mass, she did what was asked of her. Among the other girls she disappeared, unnoticed and unremarked. Only graceful blond Philippa gave her any sense there could be hope for her here. But she knew every morning when she awoke to Sister Madeleine ringing her triangle bell in the hall that she would take the first opportunity she got to leave the place, to dash out its thick wood gate and into the world, into freedom, into a life she would make all of her own.