Riding home on the Third Avenue bus, sitting anxiously on the very edge of the seat she had captured, Mildred made rapid calculations for the hundredth time that day.
Her sister Edith was arriving from Cleveland at 6:10 at Penn Station. It was already 5:22, later than she had anticipated, because some letters Mr. Sweeney wanted sent out at the last minute had delayed her at the office. She would have only about twenty-two minutes at home to straighten anything that might have gotten un-straightened since last night’s cleaning, lay the table and organize their delicatessen supper, and fix her face a bit before she left for Penn Station. It was lucky she’d done the marketing in her lunch hour. All the last half of the afternoon, though, she had watched the dark spot on the grocery bag grow bigger—the dill pickles leaking—and she’d been too busy at the office to drag all the things out and rearrange them. Now, with her firm, square hand over the wet place, she felt better.
The bus swayed to a stop, and she twisted and ducked her head to see a street marker. Only Thirty-sixth Street.
Dill pickles, pumpernickel bread, rollmops (maybe it was the rollmops leaking, not the pickles), liverwurst, salami, celery and garlic for the potato salad, coffee ring for dessert, and oranges for breakfast tomorrow. She’d found some gladiolas in her lunch hour, too, and their blossoms still looked as fresh as when she’d bought them. It seemed like everything, but she knew better than to think there wouldn’t be something at the last minute she’d forgotten.
Edith’s telegram last evening had taken her completely by surprise, but Mildred had just pitched in and cleaned everything, spent all last evening and early this morning at it, washing windows, cleaning out closets, as well as the usual dusting and sweeping and scouring. Her sister Edith was such a neat housekeeper herself, Mildred knew she would have to have things in apple pie order, if her sister was to take a good report back to their Cleveland relations. Well, at least none of the folks in Cleveland could say she’d lost her hospitality because she’d become a New Yorker. “The welcome mat is always out,” Mildred had written many a time to friends and members of the family who showed any signs of coming to New York. Her guests were treated to a home-cooked meal—though she did depend on the delicatessen quite a bit, she supposed—and to every comfort she could offer for as long as they cared to stay. Edith probably wouldn’t stay more than two or three days, though. She was just passing through on her way to Ithaca to visit her son Arthur and his wife.
She got off at Twenty-sixth Street. Five twenty-seven, said a clock in a hardware store window. She certainly would have to rush. Well, wasn’t she always rushing? A lot Edith, with nothing but a household to manage, knew of a life as busy as hers!
Mildred’s apartment house was a six-story redbrick building on Third Avenue over a delicatessen. The delicatessen’s crowded window prompted her to go over everything again. The coleslaw! And milk, of course. How could she have forgotten?
There were two women ahead of her, their shopping bags full of empty bottles, and they chatted with Mr. Weintraub and had their items charged in the notebook he kept hanging by the cash register. Mildred shifted and trembled inwardly with impatience and frustration, regretted that neighborliness had such a price these days, but her tense smile was a pleasant one.
“Coleslaw and milk,” repeated Mr. Weintraub. “Anything else?”
“No, that’s all, thank you,” Mildred said quickly, not wanting to delay the woman who had come in after her.
Some children playing tag on the sidewalk deliberately dragged an ash can into her path, but Mildred ignored them and fumbled for her keys. Necessity had taught her the trick of pushing the key with a thumb as she turned the knob with the same hand, a method she used even on those rare occasions when both arms were not full. She saw mail in her box, but she could get it later. No, it might be something from Edith. It was a beauty parlor advertisement and a postcard about a new dry-cleaning process for rugs.
“Plumber’s upstairs, Miss Stratton,” said the superintendent, who was on his way down.
“Oh? What’s happened?”
“Nothing much. Woman above had her bowl run over, and the plumber thinks the trouble might be in your place.”
“But I haven’t—” It was quicker to suffer accusation, however, so she plodded up the stairs.
The door of her apartment was ajar. She went into a narrow room whose two close-set windows looked out on the avenue. Crossing her room, she felt a lift of pride at the unaccustomed orderliness of everything. On the coffee table lay the single careless touch: a program of the performance of Hansel and Gretel she had attended last Christmas in Brooklyn. She’d found it in cleaning the bookcase, and had put it out for Edith to see.
But the sight of the bathroom made her gasp. There were black smudges on everything, even on the frame of the mirror over the basin. What didn’t plumbers and superintendents manage to touch, and weren’t their hands always black!
“All fixed, ma’am. Here’s what the trouble was.” The plumber held up something barely recognizable as a toothbrush, and smiled. “Remember it?”
“No, I don’t,” she said, letting her parcels slide onto a kitchen chair. It wasn’t her toothbrush, she was sure of that, but the less talk about it, the sooner he would leave.
While she waited to get at the bathroom, she spread her best tablecloth on the gateleg table in the kitchen, pulled the window shade down so the people in the kitchen three feet away across the air chute couldn’t see in, then dashed the morning coffee grounds into the garbage pail and stuck the dirty coffeepot into the sink. Keeping one foot on the pedal of the garbage pail, she pivoted in a half-dozen directions, reached even the bag of groceries on the chair and began to unload it.
The closing of the door told her the plumber was gone, and crushing the last paper bag into the garbage—she generally saved them for old Sam the greengrocer, but there was no time now—she went into the bathroom and erased every black fingerprint with rag and scouring powder, and mopped up the floor as she backed her way out. In the minute she allowed for the floor to dry, she pushed off her medium-heeled oxfords at the closet door and stepped into identical newer oxfords. But their laces were tied from a hasty removal, too. She stooped down, and felt a dart over her bent knee. A run. She mustn’t forget to change the stocking before she left for the station. Or had she another good stocking? Buying stockings was one of the errands she had intended to do today in her lunch hour.
Twenty-one minutes of six, she saw as she trotted into the bathroom. Eleven minutes before she ought to leave the house.
Even after the brisk scrubbing with a washrag, her squarish face looked as colorless as her short jacket of black and gray tweed. Her hair, of which the gray had recently gotten an edge over the brown, was naturally wavy, and now the more wiry gray hairs stood out from her head, making her look entirely gray, unfortunately, and giving her an air of harassed untidiness no matter what she did to correct it. But her eyes made up for the dullness of the rest of her face, she thought. Her round but rather small gray eyes still looked honest and kind, though sometimes there was a bewildered, almost frightened expression in them that shocked her. She saw it now. It was because she was hurrying so, she supposed. She must remember to look calm with Edith. Edith was so calm.
She daubed a spot of rouge on one cheek and was spreading it outward with timid strokes when the peal of the doorbell made her jump.
“Miss,” said a frail voice in the semidarkness of the hall, “take a ten-cent chance on the St. Ant’ny School lottery Saturday May twenny-second?”
“No. No, child, I haven’t time,” Mildred said, closing the door. She hated to be harsh with the little tykes, but at seventeen minutes of six…
As a matter of fact, the alarm clock shouldn’t be out on the coffee table, she thought, it looked too much as if she slept on the living room couch, which of course she did. She put the clock in a bureau drawer.
For a moment, she stood in the center of the room with her mind a comp
lete blank. What should she do next? Why was her heart beating so fast? One would think she’d been running, or at least that she was terribly excited about something, and she wasn’t really.
Maybe a bit of whiskey would help. Her father had always said a little nip was good when a person was under a strain, and she was under a slight strain, she supposed. After all, she hadn’t seen Edith in nearly two years, not since she’d been to Cleveland on her vacation two summers ago.
Mr. Sweeney had given her the whiskey last Christmas, and she hadn’t touched it since she made the eggnog Christmas Day for old Mrs. Chevlov upstairs. The bottle was still almost full. Cautiously, she poured an inch into a small glass that had once contained cheese, then added another half inch, and drank it off at a gulp to save time. The drink landed with a warm explosion inside her.
“Dear old Edith!” she said aloud, and smiled with anticipation.
The doorbell rang.
Those children again, she thought, they always tried twice. Absently, she plucked a piece of thread from the carpet, and rolled it between her thumb and forefinger, wondering if she should answer the door or not. Then the bell came again, with a rap besides, and she plunged toward it. It might be the plumber about something else.
“Miss, take a ten-cent chance on the St. Ant’ny—”
“No,” Mildred said with a shudder. “No, thank you, children.” But she found a coin in the pocket of her jacket and thrust it at them.
Then she dashed into the kitchen and set out plates, cups and saucers, and paper napkins in buffet style. It looked nice to have everything out, and would save considerable time later. She put the big mixing bowl for the potato salad on the left, and lined up beside it the smaller mixing bowl for the dressing, the salad oil, the vinegar, mustard, paprika, salt and pepper, the jar of stuffed olives—a little moldy, best wash them off—in a militarily straight row. The sugar bowl was low, she noticed, and lumpy, too. And only three minutes left! She hacked at the lumps in the bowl with a teaspoon, but not all of them would dislodge, so finally she gave it up and just added more sugar. Some of it spilled on the floor. She seized broom and dustpan and went after it. Her heart was pounding again. What on earth ailed her?
Thoughtfully, she took down the whiskey and poured another inch or two into the glass. Soothing sensations crept from her stomach in all directions, made their way even into her hands and feet. She swept up the sugar with renewed fortitude and patience, and whisked the remaining grains under the sink so they wouldn’t crackle underfoot.
The kitchen curtains caught her eye for the first time in months, but she resolutely refused to worry about their streaks of black grit. A person was allowed one fault in a household, she thought.
As she pulled on her coat, it occurred to her she hadn’t boiled the eggs for the salad, and she’d meant to do it the first thing when she came home. She put three eggs into a saucepan of water and turned the gas on high. At least she could start them in the few moments she’d be here, and turn them off as she went out the door.
Now. Had she keys? Money? Her hat. She snatched up her hat—a once-stiff pillbox of Persian lamb, much the same color as her hair—and pressed it on with the flat of her hand. Nice to have the kind of hats one didn’t have to worry about being straight or crooked, she thought, but she allowed herself one glance in the hall mirror as she passed by, and it was enough to reveal one rouged cheek and one plain one. She hurried back into the bathroom, where the light was best.
It was six minutes to six when she flew downstairs.
She’d better take a taxi to the station after all. She regretted the extravagance, though she felt herself yielding to a gaiety and abandonment that had been plucking at her ever since she thought of taking a nip of whiskey. She didn’t really care about eighty-five cents, a dollar with tip. A dollar was just a little more than one-hundredth of her weekly salary. Or a little more than one-thousandth? No, than one-hundredth, of course.
Crossing the lobby of Penn Station toward the information center, she felt the run in her stocking travel upward and was afraid to look. She’d forgotten to change it, but she wouldn’t, really wouldn’t have had time to look for a good stocking, even if she’d remembered. She could tell Edith she’d gotten the run hurrying to meet her. In fact, she thought brilliantly, Edith didn’t have to know she’d been home at all, which would make her house and herself, after some apologies, look very nice indeed.
“Downstairs for incoming train information,” the clerk told her.
Mildred trotted downstairs, and was referred to a blackboard, where she learned that the Cleveland Flyer would be twenty minutes late. Suddenly something collapsed in her, and she felt terribly tired. She started for a nearby bench, but she knew she was too restless to sit still. She wandered back upstairs. Her nervous system was not adjusted to waiting. She could wait in the office for Mr. Sweeney to finish a long telephone conversation and get back to whatever work they were doing together, but she could not wait on her own time—for an elevator, for a clerk in a department store, or on a line in the post office—without growing anxious and jumpy. Maybe another touch of whiskey would be a good idea, she thought, a leisurely one she could sip while she composed herself.
A big, softly lighted, pink and beige bar came into view almost immediately. And there were several women inside, she was relieved to see. Feeling strange and somehow very special, Mildred went in through the revolving door. Every table was in use, so she stood shyly behind two men at the bar, over whose shoulders she could see the barman now and then.
“Whiskey,” she said, when the barman seemed to be looking at her.
“What kind?”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she said cheerfully.
Everybody in the place seemed to be having such a good time, it was fun just to watch them. She never gave such places a thought, yet they were going full blast all over New York every evening, she supposed. It occurred to her she was probably a more sophisticated person than she realized.
She wondered if Edith still wore her hair in those stiff marcel waves. The last time she had seen Edith, she had looked like one of those dummies with wigs they have in beauty parlor windows. That wasn’t a nice thing to think about one’s sister, but Edith really had looked like them. For the first time now, Mildred realized that Edith was actually coming, that she would see her within minutes. She could hear Edith’s slow voice as clearly as if she stood beside her, saying, “Well, that’s fate, Millie,” as she often did, and as she probably would say about her daughter Phyllis’s marriage. Phyllis’s husband was only nineteen and without a job, and, according to a letter Cousin John in Toledo had written her a few weeks ago, without ambition, either. “Well, that’s fate,” Edith would say by way of passing if off. “Parents can’t boss their children anymore, once the children think they’re grown.” Mildred’s heart went out to her sister.
The square-numeraled clock on the wall said only 6:17. Just about an hour ago, she had been on the bus going home. The crowded bus seemed suddenly dismal and hideous. It was as if another person had been riding on it an hour ago, not herself, not this person who sipped whiskey in a bar where dance music played, this person who awaited a train from Cleveland.
One of the men offered her a high red stool, but she was so short, she decided just to lean against it. Then all at once it was 6:28. She paid her check, clutched her handbag, and dashed off.
Now, really now, her sister was pulling into the station. She giggled excitedly. A bell went whang-whang-whang! A metal gate folded back. People rushed up the slope, people rushed down, among them herself. And there was Edith, walking toward her!
“Edith!”
“Millie!”
They fell upon each other. My own flesh and blood, Mildred thought, patting Edith’s back and feeling a little weepy. There was confusion for a few minutes while Edith found her suitcase, Mildred asked questions about the family, and they looked for a cab. With a flash of pain, Mildred remembered the eggs on the stove
at home. They would be burning now, aflame probably, the gas was so high. How did burning eggs smell? In the taxi, Mildred braced Edith’s suitcase against the jump seat with her foot and tried to listen to everything Edith was telling her, but she couldn’t keep track of anything for thinking of the eggs.
“How is Arthur?” Mildred asked, one eye out the window to see if the driver was going right.
“Just as well as can be. He has a new baby.”
Mildred hoped every child in the neighborhood wasn’t cluttering the front steps. Sometimes they played cards right in the doorway. “Oh, a new baby! Oh, has he?”
“Yes, another little girl,” said Edith. “Just last week. I was saving it to tell you.”
“So now you’re twice a grandmother! I’ll have to send Arthur and Helen something right away.”
Edith protested she shouldn’t.
Mildred paid the driver, then struggled out with the suitcase, waving Edith’s assistance aside, and not waiting for the driver to help, because drivers usually didn’t. She realized too late that she might have added another dime to the tip, and hoped Edith hadn’t noticed. Pinching each other’s fingers under the suitcase handle, the sisters climbed the three flights. Mildred felt a rough corner of the suitcase tearing at her good stocking.
“Are you hungry?” she asked cheerily as she felt for her keys, trying not to sound out of breath. She sniffed for burning eggs.
“I had a snack on the train about five o’clock,” Edith replied, “so I’m bearing up, as they say.”
“Well, here it is, such as it is!” Mildred smiled fearfully as she swung the door open for Edith, braced for any kind of odor.
“It’s just lovely,” Edith said, even before the light was turned on.
Mildred had flown past her into the kitchen. The eggs were turned off, resting quietly in their water. She stared at them incredulously for a second or two. “It’s just the one room and a bit of a kitchen this time,” Mildred remarked as she returned to her sister, for Edith, standing in the middle of the room, seemed to be expecting her to show her the rest. “But it’s much more convenient to the office than the Bronx apartment was. I know you’ll want to wash up, Edie, so just have your coat off and I’ll show you where everything is.”