“This road continues all the way to Port Oriskany, on Lake Erie,” Lowry said. “North of town, the road leads to Lake Ontario.” As if Clara knew, or, staring so hard at what lay before her, gave a damn for these places. Erie? Ontario?
Lowry pulled his car to a stop. Clara was practically leaning out the window, staring so hard. They were at the edge of the downtown on the crest of a hill; here you could see some of Main Street, and you could look back to that scary bridge and buildings on the other side of the river. Lowry was saying in a voice that sounded different, somber and almost-scolding, “Clara, there's a place for you in Tintern, I made some calls. But you need to keep quiet about yourself and don't make any trouble. Like if somebody asks where are your folks, you say politely, ‘I don't live with my folks right now. I've been on my own since sixteen.' Whatever hell age you are, sweetheart, say you're sixteen.”
Clara laughed, biting her lip. “Goddamn, I am sixteen.”
“Anyway, say it. If the wrong people catch on to you, you'll be charged with ‘runaway.' You'll be placed in some juvenile facility. They'll try to contact your family back in—wherever. Or put you in an orphanage. That's the law.”
“Well, I'm not goin back. I'll kill myself first.”
“That kind of talk, you keep to yourself. That's the first thing that'd get you taken into custody, talk like that.”
Clara tried to make her face serious. “ ‘I don't live with my folks right now. Been on my own since sixteen.' ” Goddamn, she kept wanting to laugh she was so nervous, or excited.
Lowry said, “I've made some calls like I said. There's maybe a job for you if you can make change. Learn to use a cash register.”
“ ‘Make change'—?”
“Like, changing a dollar bill. Five-dollar bill.”
“Sure! Sure I can do that.”
Clara had done this for Pearl lots of times. Even before Pearl got dreamy and dopey. Nancy, too. Buying things in a store, they hadn't wanted to figure out the coins, themselves. And knowing what kind of change you were going to get back, so you wouldn't be cheated.
Eagerly Clara said, “It's easy: you think of a dollar as being one hundred pennies. Then you—” but Lowry cut her off.
He turned the key in the ignition, to start the car motor again. Going to take her somewhere now, she guessed. He had never spoken to her like this before and Clara was fearful of him now and fearful he was saying goodbye to her. “Lowry, I could—do things for you. Like women do. I could—”
“No. I told you, Clara. I don't stay in one place long. And nobody comes with me. I don't marry any of them, either. Erase me from your head because you're just not the one, kid. Not just you're too young which you are, but what I want is a—voice. A way a woman talks to me, says things to me I don't know and am astonished to hear and I'll know her as soon as I hear her. Or maybe I never will hear her, and that's all right, too. Because my father was poison to women, and damned if I will be, too. And some things, the worst things, run in your blood.”
Clara nodded numbly. Not wanting to think this could be so.
Saying desperately, like a pleading dog if such could speak, “Lowry, why'd you ever bother with me?”
Lowry, driving his car, pulled to a traffic light and didn't answer at once. Didn't look at her, either.
“It wasn't ‘bother,' Clara. Don't think that.”
“You helped me. Saved me. You—”
“Maybe I always wanted a little sister. Maybe that's it.”
2
“I have a job. I'm on my own now.”
Astonishing to Clara who had expected to be working out in the fields, or scrubbing some rich ladies' toilets, she had a job in the Woolworth's Five & Dime right on Main Street. Somehow, Lowry had arranged for her to be interviewed by the fattish middle-aged manager Mr. Mulch, and she'd been hired right off. A store! In town! Clara couldn't believe her good luck. She smiled to think how Rosalie would envy her. Clara Walpole, a salesclerk in a store.
It was like the world had been broken into pieces and tossed into the air and come down again in a nicer arrangement. Yet an arrangement Clara could not believe had anything to do with her— what she deserved, what she'd earned. Sharing a long counter with another girl, who'd quit school in ninth grade a few years back and was passing time till her fiancé could afford to marry her; selling sewing supplies—scissors, threads of all colors, ready-made ruffled curtains, cloth of all colors and prints. On a slow day, if the manager wasn't around, you could drift over to visit Joanie at the candy counter who'd give away broken-off bits of peanut brittle, ribbon candy, stale old bonbons and marshmallows about to be removed from the display case and tossed into the garbage. And there was the magazine and pocket book rack, where you could leaf through Silver Screen, True Romance, Collier's and Life. There were paperback novels Clara stole away for overnight reading—Lamb in His Bosom, So Big, Honey in the Horn. Lowry was impressed, Clara spoke of such books. She meant to demonstrate to him how mature she was, and independent.
Goddamn, though: she wished she'd learned to read better. It took her an hour sometimes to read a dozen pages, pushing her finger beneath the words and mouthing them like a first grader.
Being a salesgirl at the five-and-dime was glamorous-seeming, and Clara was proud of her position, but it was harder work than you'd have guessed. Waiting on customers was the easy part. Also you had to unpack merchandise at the back of the store and carry it to the front; you had to repack old merchandise, back into grimy old cartons. You had to help sweep up. You had to help wash the big fly-specked windows. The five-and-dime was in a block-long row of brick buildings infested with roaches and rodents, and under Mr. Mulch's disgusted direction you had to deal with these: nasty-smelling poisons set out for the roaches, and traps with wicked steel springs for the mice and rats. The tricky thing was, the rats could devour the mice's cheese bait and if the trap sprung it didn't hurt them one damn bit.
Clara had to laugh, she'd used to think a store in town was so special. Now she knew better, but it was a kind of secret you kept so people outside the store didn't know. So funny! Joanie made them all laugh complaining of rodents breaking into her candy display case in the night, that was supposed to be rodent-proof, eating just parts of some candies and leaving the rest, and tracking goddamn turds she had to brush off by hand. Mr. Mulch's byword was What the customer don't know don't hurt 'em.
Lowry asked Clara how she liked her job at Woolworth's, and Clara said she'd never had a job she loved so much. And Lowry seemed pleased, and maybe proud of her.
“Mulch says you're learning fast. ‘Sharpest-eyed girl in the store.' ”
So happy! Lowry had found a furnished room for Clara, with its own tiny bathroom, and had paid her first three months' rent. This he'd done without telling her, exactly—that was Lowry's way. The room was on Mohigan Street around the corner from Main, above a hardware store. Through her rear window Clara could see, slant- wise, that high old nightmare bridge and a slice of the Eden River. For a long time she sat dreamy-eyed in her windows gazing out. She imagined herself telling Rosalie I live by myself now. On a second floor.
Mostly, she'd ceased thinking of the past. She did not wish to think of Carleton, Pearl, her brothers. Her sister Sharleen she had not seen in years and would never see again. She did not wish to think of her spindly limbed child-self she'd rapidly outgrown.
From the five-and-dime discards Clara acquired old melted lipsticks, broken packages of face powder, bent tweezers. Eyebrow pencils. Plucking and arching her eyebrows in the style of Joan Crawford, or Katharine Hepburn, or Bette Davis whose movies she saw for ten cents, in the movie house on Main Street. Clara loved best those movies where a man and a woman met, and fell in love; and the man went away; and the woman missed him, and waited for him; and the man returned. Emerging into the evening air, Clara wiped at her eyes.
So happy! This was her new life, and there was a man she was waiting for. There was a man her hopes could fasten upon, always.
>
Yet: sad sometimes. Lonely sometimes. As she'd never been sad and lonely in her old, lost life she had believed she despised.
For now, suddenly, there were two times in Clara's life, and disproportionate times they were. When Lowry was in Tintern, and would take time to see her; and when Lowry was away.
He'd warned her not to speak of him to anyone, and so she had not. Seeming to know that if she boasted of him, or complained of him, he would disappear from her life as abruptly as he'd appeared; and she would be left alone in Tintern, under the eye of Mr. Mulch.
Lowry was beginning to take notice of her, Clara thought. For she was older now, living alone and spending so much time in her own thoughts. Tilting her head like Katharine Hepburn, fixing her eyes upon a man's face like Claudette Colbert. And her hair, she'd begun to trim and curl with bobby pins, parted neatly on the left side of her head in the way of Joan Fontaine, whose hair was ashy-blond like Clara's. Lowry took her driving in his car, along the river; rarely did he take her to a restaurant or tavern in Tintern, only elsewhere. He was ashamed of her, she guessed. She understood, and did not blame him.
As a dime-store girl, Clara was able to buy things at a reduced price. Sweaters, blouses, skirts, sometimes even dresses. In those towns in the Eden Valley to which Lowry drove her she appeared older than fifteen in her gaudy, tight-fitting clothes and high-heeled shoes. Lowry, in public, seemed always in a hurry and walking with his face slightly averted, as if he were both with her, yet not with her. Sometimes he was in good spirits, playful; at other times he behaved like an older and remote relative of hers, a cousin or uncle entrusted with her for the evening. If Clara dared to take his hand, and stroke his fingers, as she'd seen women do in movies, Lowry stiffened but didn't always draw away at once.
Sometimes, as if unconsciously, his fingers closed about hers.
“My little girl's getting growed up. Happens fast, sometimes.”
Clara smiled, in that way she'd perfected of not showing any more teeth than she needed to show. Her heart was suffused with happiness. My little girl.
One Saturday night Lowry drove her to Lake Shaheen, which must have been about twenty miles to the north. The Anchor Inn was on the lake and overlooked a boatyard. Clara had never been inside so nice a place: it excited her that Lowry seemed to be known here. The main room, with a timber ceiling, was crowded and romantically dim-lit, and people were dancing. Some of the women were young, nearly as young as Clara. “I want to dance. Oh, let's dance!” Clara begged.
But Lowry left her in a booth by herself, drinking a Cola and eating pretzels. He'd told her he had friends to see, to catch up on, and Clara had smiled and said that was all right; she was happy sitting by herself in such a nice place, and listening to music. Her eyes followed the dancers, eagerly. Just watching, she was learning: it was like the movies. It was like ringing up sales at the five-and-dime, you learned by doing. In fact she'd learned to smoke, from Lowry. She'd needed something to do with her hands.
For when Lowry drifted away from her, talking with women he hadn't troubled to introduce to her, Clara needed something to do with her hands.
At the Anchor Inn that night, Clara waited. Thinking I can wait. I've been waiting fifteen years. I'm happy.
Lowry returned, she saw a smear of lipstick on the side of his face. He might have checked his reflection in a mirror and missed that smear. “Sorry, sweetheart. Something came up.”
In the car driving back to Tintern, Clara spoke quietly of a man who'd befriended her. Took her to the movies. In fact he was the hardware store owner, and Clara believed he was a married man, but she didn't tell Lowry this. “He said, any new dress I wanted, in any shop in Tintern, he'd buy for me. If I wanted it.”
“What's that mean?”
“I don't know. What it means.”
“You want to get pregnant?”
“Get pregnant?” Clara was incensed, insulted. “All we do, mister, we go to the movies! That's all.”
“How many times did your mother get pregnant?”
“None of your damn business. Damn you!”
Clara was smoking, trying not to cough. A flame of pure hatred pulsed over her, for this man beside her.
“You don't care about me. You never did. I'm just some old mangy kicked dog you found along the highway.”
“Is that so.”
“Somebody would marry me. People say I'm pretty.”
Lowry, driving, leaning his elbow out the window, said nothing.
“Then I wouldn't be a bother to you.”
“Clara, you aren't a bother to me.”
Clara was thinking: if she could read better—if she could write— if she didn't have to struggle so with words, things would come easier for her. There were times when an idea brushed her mind, but she couldn't seize it. Like a butterfly fluttering out of her reach.
Lowry said, in the way of a man reasoning something out for himself that surprised him, “You were just a kid then. Not that long ago, but you've changed. I don't believe I had ever done one damn thing in my life I was proud of or cared even to contemplate, but I was glad that I could help you. And I didn't take advantage of you, either.”
“That woman back there, at the tavern,” Clara said carefully, “is she—”
“None of your business. That's what she is.”
At Mohigan Street, Clara waited for Lowry to say goodnight to her but instead he asked could he come upstairs, see what her place was like? “Sure!” Clara said. “I'll make coffee for you.”
“You, coffee?”
“I can do all sorts of things, mister. You'd be surprised.”
Upstairs she unlocked the door eagerly. She'd hoped for this: Lowry coming to see her. The small furnished room held a bed, a card table she'd draped with a floral print cloth from the dime store, a few chairs. Waterfall and sunset scenes she'd framed in dime-store frames and hung on the walls, like real pictures. “This is new. I got it at the store, marked down.” A small lamp of dimpled milk glass and a shade decorated with pink satin bows. Lowry smiled, and switched it on.
Uninvited, Lowry sat on the edge of Clara's bed. There was no bedspread yet, she was saving for something nice. But the bed was neatly made, and she knew he was seeing that, taking note. A dark blue blanket primly drawn over the single pillow. On the floor at Lowry's feet was a small oval rug of some fuzzy material, also dark blue. Lowry looked at it for a second too long.
“For when I'm barefoot and it's cold,” Clara said.
Clara fumbled to make coffee. She'd learned at the five-and-dime, where instant coffee was sold. Lowry glanced through some of the magazines Clara had brought home. She was embarrassed, damn old dumb movie magazines, a True Romance her friend Sonya had given her. “Clara, why don't you go back to school? What grade were you, when you dropped out?”
Clara said quickly, “I'm too old.”
“If you want a life different from your parents' lives, you need to be educated, at least some. I could help you.”
“I said I'm too old.”
Clara bit her lips to keep from crying. That flame of hatred for him came over her, she felt weak, dazed as if he'd struck her.
She was fumbling, preparing coffee. Her double-burner hot plate, in a corner of the room. Here too was a small enamel sink with a rusty faucet. Above the sink, a calendar with a photo of a baby in a bonnet playing with two kittens. Clara began to chatter nervously telling Lowry about working at the store; and about her girlfriends she liked so much, and trusted—Joanie, Sonya, Caroline. She'd told Lowry about them before and he'd never seemed interested as if Clara's life apart from him was of no significance. How many times she had tormented herself over the months with Lowry's words What I want is a voice. A woman, a voice. Her own voice was thin, nasal, persistent as a head cold. “Caroline, she's engaged, too. She's only eighteen. Her fiancé works on that big farm up the valley.”
“The Revere farm?”
Lowry's voice was alert, edgy.
“ ‘Revere.
' I guess so. D'you know who it is?”
Lowry didn't reply at once. Then he said, “The same family owns the gypsum land, too. The mines.” He paused again, like a man who isn't certain what he means to say, listening to his own words. “They were neighbors of ours. The Reveres.”
“That's where you live now? Up the valley?”
“No.”
Lowry's answer was short, curt. Clara knew she must not ask more. She poured coffee for Lowry, carefully into one of her good, clean cups; the hot steaming coffee smelled good to her, but was too strong for her to drink at this time of night. Lowry said, shrugging, “They bought out my father. He hadn't any choice but to sell. What's called the Depression now, nobody knew what the hell was happening then. It was like the earth opening up and swallowing some people but not others, their neighbors. Though I know it was more than that, I know there was human blame. Fuckers!”
Clara nodded vaguely. The Depression: Carleton had spoken of it sometimes, resentfully. The Depression kept farmers' prices low, so pickers were paid low. The Depression shut down factories, businesses, so there were too many pickers for the jobs, the jobs went to the cheapest labor. The Depression made Clara think of a sky of ugly thunderhead clouds, bruise-colored.
“My folks wanted to own things, lots of land. More than they could farm. So they lost it all. I'm not like them, I don't give a shit for owning things. Just my car.” Lowry spoke with an air of bemusement. He sipped Clara's coffee not seeming to mind how hot it was.
“I want to own lots of things!” Clara said. “I love these things here, my rugs and pictures. The bed I don't own but the sheets and things. My own sheets … I have my own toothbrush. I'm going to get a certain bedspread at the store, it's kind of gold-colored, with embroidered flowers. Then, a goldfish.”