The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

  “No,” Elizabeth said.

  “You know, now that I think about it, I don’t think they did. They always had that big fall dance, and I don’t remember them having it since… What was it called, the Autumn Something?”

  “The Harvest Ball,” Elizabeth said.

  Thursday morning Elizabeth walked back over to the campus to get another job application. Paul had been late going to work. “Did you talk to Brubaker’s wife?” he had said on his way out the door. Elizabeth had forgotten all about Mrs. Brubaker. She wondered which one she had been, Barbara who liked bananas or Meg who liked marshmallows.

  “Yes,” she said. “I told her how much you liked the university.”

  “Good. There’s a faculty concert tomorrow night. Brubaker asked if we were going. I invited them over for coffee afterwards. Did you turn the heat up again?” he said. He looked at the thermostat and turned it down to sixty. “You had it turned up to eighty. I can hardly wait to see what our first gas bill is. The last thing I need is a two-hundred-dollar gas bill, Elizabeth. Do you realize what this move is costing us?”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said. “I do.”

  She had turned the thermostat back up as soon as he left, but it didn’t seem to do any good. She put on a sweater and her raincoat and walked over to the campus.

  The rain had stopped sometime during the night, but the central walk was still wet. At the far end, a girl in a yellow slicker stepped up on the curb. She took a few steps on the sidewalk, her head bent, as if she were looking at something on the ground, and then cut across the wet grass toward Gunter.

  Elizabeth went into Carter Hall. The girl who had helped her the day before was leaning over the counter, taking notes from a textbook. She was wearing a pleated skirt and sweater like Elizabeth had worn in college.

  “The styles we wore have all come back,” Tib had said when they had lunch together. “Those matching sweater-and-skirt sets and those horrible flats that we never could keep on our feet. And penny loafers.” She was on her third peach daiquiri and her voice had gotten calmer with each one, so that she almost sounded like her old self. “And cocktail dresses! Do you remember that rust formal you had, with the scoop neck and the long skirt with the raised design? I always loved that dress. Do you remember that time you loaned it to me for the Angel Flight dance?”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said, and picked up the bill.

  Tib tried to stir her peach daiquiri with its mint sprig, but it slipped out of her fingers and sank to the bottom of the glass. “He really only took me to be nice.”

  “I know,” Elizabeth had said. “Now how much do I owe? Six-fifty for the crepes and two for the wine cooler. Do they add on the tip here?”

  “I need another job application,” Elizabeth said to the girl.

  “Sure thing.” When the girl walked over to the files to get it, Elizabeth could see that she was wearing flat-heeled shoes like she had worn in college. Elizabeth thanked her and put the application in her purse.

  She walked up past her dorm. The worm was still lying there. The sidewalk around it was almost dry, and the worm was a darker red than it should have been. “I should have put it in the grass,” she said out loud. She knew it was dead, but she picked it up and put it in the grass anyway, so no one would step on it. It was cold to the touch.

  Sandy Konkel came over in the afternoon wearing a gray polyester pantsuit. She had a wet high-school letter jacket over her head. “John loaned me his jacket,” she said. “I wasn’t going to wear a coat this morning, but John told me I was going to get drenched. Which I was.”

  “You might want to put it on,” Elizabeth said. “I’m sorry it’s so cold in here. I think there’s something wrong with the furnace.”

  “I’m fine,” Sandy said. “You know, I wrote that article on your husband being the new assistant dean, and I asked him about you, but he didn’t say anything about your having gone to college here.”

  She had a thick notebook with her. She opened it at tabbed sections. “We might as well get this alum stuff out of the way first, and then we can talk. This alum-rep job is a real pain, but I must admit I get kind of a kick out of finding out what happened to everybody. Let’s see,” she said, thumbing through the sections. “Found, lost, hopelessly lost, deceased. I think you’re one of the hopelessly lost. Right? Okay.” She dug a pencil out of her purse. “You were Elizabeth Wilson.”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said. “I was.” She had taken off her light sweater and put on a heavy wool one when she got home, but she was still cold. She rubbed her hands along her upper arms. “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Sure,” she said. She followed Elizabeth to the kitchen and asked her questions about Paul and his job and whether they had any children while Elizabeth made coffee and put out the cream and sugar and a plate of the cookies she had baked for after the concert.

  “I’ll read you some names off the hopelessly lost list, and if you know what happened to them, just stop me. Carolyn Waugh, Pam Callison, Linda Bohlender.” She was several names past Cheryl Tibner before Elizabeth realized that was Tib.

  “I saw Tib in Denver this summer,” she said. “Her married name’s Scates, but she’s getting a divorce, and I don’t know if she’s going to go back to her maiden name or not.”

  “What’s she doing?” Sandy said.

  She’s drinking too much, Elizabeth thought, and she let her hair grow out, and she’s too thin. “She’s working for a stockbroker,” she said, and went to get the address Tib had given her. Sandy wrote it down and then flipped to the tabbed section marked “Found” and entered the name and address again.

  “Would you like some more coffee, Mrs. Konkel?” Elizabeth said.

  “You still don’t remember me, do you?” Sandy said. She stood up and took off her jacket. She was wearing a short-sleeved gray knit shell underneath it. “I was Karen Zamora’s roommate. Sondra Dickeson?”

  Sondra Dickeson. She had had pale-blond hair that she wore in a pageboy, and a winter-white cashmere sweater and a matching white skirt with a kick pleat. She had worn it with black heels and a string of real pearls.

  Sandy laughed. “You should see the expression on your face. You remember me now, don’t you?”

  “I’m sorry. I just didn’t…I should have…”

  “Listen, it’s okay,” she said. She took a sip of coffee. “At least you didn’t say, ‘How could you let yourself go like that?’ like Janice Brubaker did.” She bit into a cookie. “Well, aren’t you going to ask me whatever became of Sondra Dickeson? It’s a great story.”

  “What happened to her?” Elizabeth said. She felt suddenly colder. She poured herself another cup of coffee and sat back down, wrapping her hands around the cup for warmth.

  Sandy finished the cookie and took another one. “Well, if you remember, I was kind of a snot in those days. I was going to this Sigma Chi dinner dance with Chuck Pagano. Do you remember him? Well, anyway, we were going to this dance clear out in the country somewhere, and he stopped the car and got all clutchy-grabby, and I got mad because he was messing up my hair and my makeup so I got out of the car. And he drove off. So there I was, standing in the middle of nowhere in a formal and high heels. I hadn’t even grabbed my purse or anything, and it’s getting dark, and Sondra Dickeson is such a snot that it never even occurs to her to walk back to town or try to find a phone or something. No, she just stands there like an idiot in her brocade formal and her orchid corsage and her dyed satin pumps and thinks, ‘He can’t do this to me. Who does he think he is?’”

  She was talking about herself as if she had been another person, which Elizabeth supposed she had been, an ice-blond with a pageboy and a formal like the one Elizabeth had loaned Tib for the Harvest Ball, a rust satin bodice and a bell skirt out of sculptured rust brocade. After the dance Elizabeth had given it to the Salvation Army.

  “Did Chuck come back?” she said.

  “Yes,” Sandy said, frowning, and then grinned. “But not soon enough. Anyway
, it’s almost dark and along comes this truck with no lights on, and this guy leans out and says, ‘Hiya, gorgeous. Wanta ride?’” She smiled at her coffee cup as if she could still hear him saying it. “He was awful. His hair was down to his ears and his fingernails were black. He wiped his hand on his shirt and helped me up into the truck. He practically pulled my arm out of its socket, and then he said, ‘I thought there for a minute I was going to have to go around behind and shove. You know, you’re lucky I came along. I’m not usually out after dark on account of my lights being out, but I had a flat tire.’”

  She’s happy, Elizabeth thought, putting her hand over the top of her cup to try to warm herself with the steam.

  “And he took me home and I thanked him and the next week he showed up at the Phi house and asked me out for a date, and I was so surprised that I went, and I married him, and we have four kids.”

  The furnace kicked on, and Elizabeth could feel the air coming out of the vent under the table, but it felt cold. “You went out with him?” she said.

  “Hard to believe, isn’t it? I mean, at that age all you can think about is your precious self. You’re so worried about getting laughed at or getting hurt, you can’t even see anybody else. When my sorority sister told me he was downstairs, all I could think of was how he must look, his hair all slicked back with water and cleaning those black fingernails with a penknife, and what everybody would say. I almost told her to tell him I wasn’t there.”

  “What if you had done that?”

  “I guess I’d still be Sondra Dickeson, the snot, a fate worse than death.”

  “A fate worse than death,” Elizabeth said, almost to herself, but Sandy didn’t hear her. She was plunging along, telling the story that she got to tell every time somebody new moved to town, and no wonder she liked being alum rep.

  “My sorority sister said, ‘He’s really got intestinal fortitude coming here like this, thinking you’d go out with him,’ and I thought about him, sitting down there being laughed at, being hurt, and I told my roommate to go to hell and went downstairs and that was that.” She looked at the kitchen clock. “Good lord, is it that late? I’m going to have to go pick up the kids pretty soon.” She ran her finger down the hopelessly lost list. “How about Dallas Tindall, May Matsumoto, Ralph DeArvill?”

  “No,” Elizabeth said. “Is Tupper Hofwalt on that list?”

  “Hofwalt.” She flipped several pages over. “Was Tupper his real name?”

  “No. Phillip. But everybody called him Tupper because he sold Tupperware.”

  She looked up. “I remember him. He had a Tupperware party in our dorm when I was a freshman.” She flipped back to the Found section and started paging through it.

  He had talked Elizabeth and Tib into having a Tupperware party in the dorm. “As co-hostesses you’ll be eligible to earn points toward a popcorn popper,” he had said. “You don’t have to do anything except come up with some refreshments, and your mothers are always sending you cookies, right? And I’ll owe you guys a favor.”

  They had had the party in the dorm lounge. Tupper pinned the names of famous people on their backs, and they had to figure out who they were by asking questions about themselves.

  Elizabeth was Twiggy. “Am I a girl?” she asked Tib.

  “Yes.”

  “Am I pretty?”

  “Yes,” Tupper had said before Tib could answer.

  After she guessed it, she went over and stooped down next to the coffee table where Tupper was setting up his display of plastic bowls. “Do you really think Twiggy’s pretty?” she asked.

  “Who said anything about Twiggy?” he said. “Listen, I wanted to tell you…”

  “Am I alive?” Sharon Oberhausen demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “Turn around so I can see who you are.”

  The sign on her back said Mick Jagger.

  “It’s hard to tell,” Tupper said.

  Tib was King Kong. It had taken her forever to figure it out. “Am I tall?” she asked.

  “Compared to what?” Elizabeth had said.

  She stuck her hands on her hips. “I don’t know. The Empire State Building.”

  “Yes,” Tupper said.

  He had had a hard time getting them to stop talking so he could show them his butter keeper and cake taker and popsicle makers. While they were filling out their order forms, Sharon Oberhausen said to Tib, “Do you have a date yet for the Harvest Ball?”

  “Yes,” Tib said.

  “I wish I did,” Sharon said. She leaned across Tib. “Elizabeth, do you realize everybody in ROTC has to have a date or they put you on weekend duty? Who are you going with, Tib?”

  “Listen, you guys,” Tib said, “the more you buy, the better our chances at that popcorn popper, which we are willing to share.”

  They had bought a cake and chocolate-chip ice cream. Elizabeth cut the cake in the dorm’s tiny kitchen while Tib dished it up.

  “You didn’t tell me you had a date to the Harvest Ball,” Elizabeth said. “Who is it? That guy in your ed-psych class?”

  “No.” She dug into the ice cream with a plastic spoon.

  “Who?”

  Tupper came into the kitchen with a catalog. “You’re only twenty points away from a popcorn popper,” he said. “You know what you girls need?” He folded back a page and pointed to a white plastic box. “An icecream keeper. Holds a half gallon of ice cream, and when you want some, all you do is slide this tab out”—he pointed to a flat rectangle of plastic—” and cut off a slice. No more digging around in it and getting your hands all messy.”

  Tib licked ice cream off her knuckles. “That’s the best part.”

  “Get out of here, Tupper,” Elizabeth said. “Tib’s trying to tell me who’s taking her to the Harvest Ball.”

  Tupper closed the catalog. “I am.”

  “Oh,” Elizabeth said. Sharon stuck her head around the corner. “Tupper, when do we have to pay for this stuff?” she said. “And when do we get something to eat?”

  Tupper said, “You pay before you eat,” and went back out to the lounge.

  Elizabeth drew the plastic knife across the top of the cake, making perfectly straight lines in the frosting. When she had the cake divided into squares, she cut the corner piece and put it on the paper plate next to the melting ice cream. “Do you have anything to wear?” she said. “You can borrow my rust formal.”

  Sandy was looking at her, the thick notebook opened almost to the last page. “How well did you know Tupper?” she said.

  Elizabeth’s coffee was ice cold, but she put her hand over it, as if to try to catch the steam. “Not very well. He used to date Tib.”

  “He’s on my deceased list, Elizabeth. He killed himself five years ago.”

  Paul didn’t get home till after ten. Elizabeth was sitting on the couch wrapped in a blanket.

  He went straight to the thermostat and turned it down. “How high do you have this thing turned up?” He squinted at it. “Eighty-five. Well, at least I don’t have to worry about you freezing to death. Have you been sitting there like that all day?”

  “The worm died,” she said. “I didn’t save it after all. I should have put it over on the grass.”

  “Ron Brubaker says there’s an opening for a secretary in the dean’s office. I told him you’d put in an application. You have, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said. After Sandy left, she had taken the application out of her purse and sat down at the kitchen table to fill it out. She had had it nearly filled out before she realized it was a retirement fund withholding form.

  “Sandy Konkel was here today,” she said. “She met her husband on a dirt road. They were both there by chance. By chance. It wasn’t even his route. Like the worm. Tib just walked by, she didn’t even know she did it, but the worm was too near the edge, and it went over into the water and drowned.” She started to cry. The tears felt cold running down her cheeks. “It drowned.”

  “What did you
and Sandy Konkel do? Get out the cooking sherry and reminisce about old times?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Old times.”

  In the morning Elizabeth took back the retirement fund withholding form. It had rained off and on all night, and it had turned colder. There were patches of ice on the central walk.

  “I had it almost all filled out before I realized what it was,” she told the girl. A boy in a button-down shirt and khaki pants had been leaning on the counter when Elizabeth came in. The girl was turned away from the counter, filing papers.

  “I don’t know what you’re so mad about,” the boy had said, and then stopped and looked at Elizabeth. “You’ve got a customer,” he said, and stepped away from the counter.

  “All these dumb forms look alike,” the girl said, handing the application to Elizabeth. She picked up a stack of books. “I’ve got a class. Did you need anything else?”

  Elizabeth shook her head and stepped back so the boy could finish talking to her, but the girl didn’t even look at him. She shoved the books into a backpack, slung it over her shoulder, and went out the door.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” the boy said, and started after her. By the time Elizabeth got outside, they were halfway up the walk. Elizabeth heard the boy say, “So I took her out once or twice. Is that a crime?”

  The girl jerked the backpack out of his grip and started off down the walk toward Elizabeth’s old dorm. In front of the dorm a girl in a yellow slicker was talking to another girl with short upswept blond hair. The girl in the slicker turned suddenly and started down the walk.

  A boy went past Elizabeth on a bike, hitting her elbow and knocking the application out of her hand. She grabbed for it and got it before it landed on the walk.

  “Sorry,” he said without glancing back. He was wearing a jean jacket. Its sleeves were too short, and his bony wrists stuck out. He was steering the bike with one hand and holding a big plastic sack full of pink and green bowls in the other. That was what he had hit her with.