Maureen was terrified each time she had to copy the minutes into the blue book. What if she dropped a big blot of ink…?
She had so much to do that her mind was a little confused. The secretary’s job was the most important thing in her life, but there were many other things she had to do. She had to get up early, while her mother slept, and get breakfast and start the coffee. Loretta was often out late because she had quit her job at the La Marvel Beauty Salon and now worked at the Checker Grill, which was on Michigan Avenue a couple of miles away. The pay was better and the tips were better. People were lively there, Loretta said. But the work tired her out and she had to sleep late, so Maureen had to take over in the mornings. She had to get Betty up, and sometimes Betty was mean in the mornings. She had to rinse the breakfast dishes; if she let cereal dry on a dish it was hard to get off and her mother would give her hell. She had to sweep the house when she came home from school and on certain days clean the floors, especially the kitchen floor, which got sticky, and she had to start supper because Loretta was always out at that time of day. On Saturdays she did the laundry and the rest of the week she did the ironing, depending on how fast things were needed. Sometimes Loretta hugged her and said, “That’s my good girl, you’re a great kid!” And sometimes she was in a hurry, stomping around in her high heels and looking for a blouse or something, and she might say, irritated, “You mean that blouse is still in the basket? On Wednesday, still in the basket?”
She wrote out the secretary’s minutes at school, staying late, because at home the book might get soiled or rumpled.
One day her mother paused and came over to sit by her. It was a Saturday. She put her hand fondly on Maureen’s shoulder. Maureen wondered what was wrong. Was Loretta drunk at this time of day? Her hair was done up in pink plastic curlers. She smelled of bath powder. “Well, you’re getting grown up, huh?” Loretta said, confidential. “You and I have got to have a talk one of these days. Jesus, the years go fast! And that brat Betty, she’s getting big for her age—where is she always running off to? Who does she hang around with?”
“Oh, a few kids. I don’t know.”
But Loretta forgot about Betty. Betty with her muscular legs was in and out of the house, bumping into things, and it was always better when she was gone, so why should Loretta nag her into staying home? Loretta stared at Maureen in a tender, critical, curious way. Maureen drew back slightly. There was silence for a few seconds, then Loretta said, reddening, “You…you better watch out for them boys, huh? Boys ever fool around with you?”
“Ma, no.”
“You tell the truth now.”
“I said no,” Maureen said miserably. She stared down at her feet.
Loretta tried to laugh. The moment grew unbearably warm. Finally she said with a pleasant harshness, “Kids your age never tell the truth. I don’t believe one word you say, kid!”
Maureen could not think of anything to say. She was very ashamed.
“You want to ask me anything? I mean, about anything—you know,” Loretta said.
“No.”
“Well…”
They sat for a while in silence. Loretta was picking the polish off one of her nails. She made a tsk-ing sound, as if the fingernail polish had disappointed her.
“You get bad cramps or anything?”
“No.”
“Well, you always did keep to yourself. You got a lot of secrets for a kid your age,” Loretta said with a laugh, relieved, dismissing her.
But half an hour later she came out of the back bedroom and handed Maureen a sweater, one of her own. “Here. This is too small for me—how about you? You want it? Go ahead, take it. Try it on.”
“Can I have it?” Maureen said, surprised.
“I said take it. Try it on.” She sat in her silky green kimono, her arms folded, watching Maureen.
Maureen put the sweater on.
Loretta said, “If you’d stand up straight you’d be all right. You’ll have a nice shape, but I might have to put a harness on you—you know what that is?”
Maureen stared at her.
“A harness to make you stand straight,” Loretta said.
“What…what is it?”
“Oh, Christ, I’m just kidding! Can’t you take a joke? Always a long face! Christ! Aren’t you going to thank me?”
“Thank you, Ma.”
“Your face isn’t bad for a kid your age.”
Maureen turned away.
“You tell me if any boys bother you or anything. Around school or anything. Okay?”
Maureen nodded.
“If Jules wasn’t always bumming around…”
Jules had quit school. He worked for a trucking outfit and had his own car, a 1950 Ford, and he came home to sleep only once or twice a week. Where he ate, who his friends were, where he stayed on the nights he didn’t come home, Loretta didn’t know. When she asked him he would say, “I get along all right, don’t worry,” and the conversation would drift off idly to something else. Loretta did not think that anything was going wrong because, after all, Jules gave her twenty dollars a week, every week. He was a good kid. The only bad thing that had happened was back in August, when he’d been picked up with some other boys and booked for something or other—burglary, trespassing, “suspicious behavior”—but he was let out in three days and nothing had come of it. Maybe they had lost the records. He’d been in Children’s Shelter off and on, and once he had been kept there for a day and a night before Loretta had even known about it; Jules had told them he was from Toledo, a runaway. “Christ, what a crazy kid! What an imagination!” Loretta had cried. But those charges had been dropped and so Loretta forgot about them. There was so much for her to think about.
For one thing, they had to move again.
Now that Grandma Wendall was in a nursing home and gotten rid of, Loretta was able to do what she had always wanted: move into an apartment. She was fed up, she said, with running a house. It took too much of her time. The bathroom plumbing was always backing up, the furnace was always stinking up the rooms, everything was getting dirtier and dirtier and falling apart, and it was dangerous to live here now without a man. If only Jules didn’t bum around so much, but you can’t do anything with a kid that age…She found a corner apartment over a drugstore not far from the Cadillac plant. It was a better neighborhood, Loretta said. She liked it. She liked living in an apartment. It turned out that there were more cockroaches there than in the house, but Maureen kept saying that it was nice because Loretta seemed anxious to hear that it was nice—she wanted nice things—nice things!—after all the crap she’d been through! She deserved them. What she deserved was a vacation, or a fur coat, or a bigger television set, or some wonderful surprise—she didn’t know what. Then, one day, she mentioned “Pat” for the first time.
She kept mentioning “Pat”—Maureen thought in the beginning “Pat” was a woman, then realized it was a man. “Pat knows the inside story on that, the Mayor’s kid,” she would say. Or, “Pat said that fire was really caused on purpose, the owner is a Jew, he collected a million in insurance.”
Maureen and Betty exchanged looks but Loretta never explained. It was part of her new fluttery style to talk fast, excitedly.
At school Maureen thought with dread, “Who is Pat?”
She ran into her brother one afternoon on the street. He was wearing a dark trench coat; he looked handsome. Broken away from home, he must have been, at last, free at last, to look so handsome on the street! She tugged at his arm, overjoyed at seeing him.
“Honey, I’m in a hurry, I’m going in here to get some cigarettes,” he said. He sounded a little guilty.
Maureen looked around in disappointment. She saw a car at the curb, not Jules’s old car, and in the car was a woman with very short blond hair, cut straight across her forehead and across her ears. She had a boyish, cold look. She looked at Maureen but her face showed nothing.
br /> “Jules, there’s some guy Ma is going with—his name is Pat. You know anything about it?”
“I’m in a hurry—”
“When are you coming home? What’s wrong? You ever heard of this guy Pat?”
“It’s just some guy. He’s all right.”
“You know him?”
“He’s all right.” He pulled away from her gently and went into the drugstore.
Maureen followed him. “Don’t you like us at home any more?” she said. “Do you have your own place now?”
“I’m doing all right.”
“Don’t you like us any more?”
“Sure I like you.”
“You’re never going back to school?”
“I’m through with that crap.”
“Aren’t you going to visit us, Jules? Why not? I don’t like the place we live in now. I can’t sleep. I keep thinking we’re somewhere else—I get mixed up. I keep thinking I hear Pa walking around, you know, like when he would get up to go to the bathroom at night. Why did Ma want to move?”
“You’re better off where you are.”
“Don’t you like me any more, Jules?”
“Hey, do you need any money?”
“I don’t want money!” Maureen cried.
Jules turned from her, annoyed. She was talking too loudly. He went to the counter and bought some cigarettes. Maureen stared at his back, something was happening, something terrible—she was losing Jules or had already lost him…was losing something or had already lost it.
When he came back she said politely, “Yes, I could use some money. Can I borrow a dollar?”
“Sure, sweetheart.” Jules smiled, relieved, and took out his wallet. Maureen noted that it looked new. “Here,” he said, giving her three dollars, “go see a movie or something. Buy a dress. Be good.”
“A dress for three dollars?” Maureen laughed.
He gave her another bill—a five-dollar bill.
“Oh, Jules, thanks! Thank you!”
They stared at each other, suddenly embarrassed. Jules put his wallet away. Maureen put the money in her army-surplus purse, a small boxlike purse of the kind all the girls had; it had been used to store bullets, so they said.
They left the drugstore. Maureen did not dare ask about the woman in the car.
“Hey, how’s Ma these days?” Jules asked, backing off.
“Real good.”
“And Betty?”
“I don’t know, the same.”
“Grandma?”
“I guess the same.”
“Take care of yourself, kid!”
Maureen did not look toward the woman in the car. She felt as if she were in some peculiar danger, yet not knowing what the danger was. In Jules’s nervous, cheerful manner there was something that frightened her.
It was on her way home that afternoon that she realized she had lost the secretary’s notebook. It was gone. And why was she bringing it home, what had she been thinking of? The notebook with the blue cover, the official notebook….Minutes had gone back to 1953 in that book, recorded by other secretaries; Maureen had lost it. She had been carrying several books and the notebook, but now the notebook was gone. She kept looking through the books again and again. She found nothing.
In a panic she ran back to the drugstore. She looked inside. She looked out on the sidewalk. The strange thing was: why had she been bringing the notebook home? She could not think. She hurried back toward school, her heart thudding. The blue notebook was so real to her that she kept thinking she saw it, in a doorway, in an alley, in the gutter…she was going crazy, seeing it when it wasn’t there, her eyes beginning to water….But how could she have lost it? She must have left it in school.
She set her books down on the curb. She looked through them again. Her fingers were trembling. It’s got to be here, she thought. A few people passed her. They glanced down at the girl in the nuns’ school outfit, her coat undone, her hair thick and blown about her face in the air of that wide, windy, evil Michigan Avenue; a girl going through the worst experience of her life. They glanced at her and glanced away. It seemed to Maureen that her life was coming undone. The world was opening up to trap her, she was losing her mind, she was coming undone, unfastened. It was like that time her period had begun in school, a hot flow of blood, a terrible sickening surprise yet not really a surprise, and she’d gone in the girls’ room and, trembling, nearly in a convulsion, she had tried to fix herself up but hadn’t been able to think of what to do, only that blood was coming out of her and would not stop, and she felt in the presence of Carol’s mother…the heavy winking ugly wisdom of the insane, knowing everything, prepared for everything, no surprise so sickening it can’t be mastered with a lopsided grin….It would be the end if she started to cry. So she picked up her books and ran back toward school. She crossed a vacant lot she had crossed earlier. Papers and junk everywhere but no blue notebook. She looked along the path, kicking things aside: nothing. She looked in an alley. She turned in a strange suspended terror and looked around at the buildings all around her, used-up, without features, the empty buildings of grownups that told her nothing: Michaelson Brothers Towel Service, Lenox Photographs, Detroit Furniture and Refrigerator Resale. The wind blew tiny bits of dirt against her. Her eyes watered. She thought again of Jules, who had driven away, and of Carol’s mother, and of Room 202 and Sister Mary Paul. Sister’s face knew everything. Maureen’s life was in her keeping. Maureen was guilty and never, never would she be forgiven, there was no way out, no escape, no help—oh, she would give up everything, give up her mother, her brother, her own life just to be innocent again, to have things back the way they were at two-thirty that afternoon!
Out of breath, crying, she reached the school. Sister Mary Paul was still in her room. She was disgusted. “Go look for it,” she told Maureen. Maureen ran out to look for it. She hurried around the concrete yard, though she knew the notebook could not be there; but perhaps Sister was watching from a window. She looked around by the fence, all along the fence: nothing. She looked in a pile of trash. The yard was empty. The walls were dirty with scrawled words, half mysterious and forbidden. Maureen usually did not look at those words but today she stood staring at them dully. No one else was in the yard. Everything was over, finished—the future was finished. The wind, high above the old church steeple, was making a curious hollow noise. Maureen could not think what to do. She hardly knew what to think, what to occupy her mind with.
Finally she retraced her steps to the corner where she’d met Jules. Maybe he had seen it? Maybe he had it? She looked everywhere, everywhere. She walked back and forth on the sidewalk. Could the notebook already be at home? Somehow at home? Or had someone at school stolen it? Could she buy a notebook like the one that was lost? But she couldn’t make up the old minutes, the many pages of minutes from other years—it was hopeless, a trap—discussions about paper cups, about who had taken someone’s mittens, all those minutes of old talk conducted in Room 202, all of it lost, all of it her fault.
She felt that her mind was coming undone. She ran back to school.
Sister Mary Paul was at Mass, they said. It was already four-thirty. Maureen waited for her. “I couldn’t find it!” she said, beginning to cry again.
“Keep looking for it,” the nun said coldly.
Maureen tried to seize the woman’s hands. “Please forgive me! Forgive me! I didn’t mean to lose it—”
“Go look for it. Keep looking.”
She kept looking around on the street until it was dark. At home she wept. The next morning she got up at six to go out and look again—a blue notebook, lost, a blue notebook, she had to find it. She thought of nothing else. Every morning of that week she had to report to Sister Mary Paul that she was still looking. Still looking. Sister Mary Paul said, “Keep looking. Those are important records.” The week passed slowly, in a dream. Maureen’s head ached constantly, she could
not sleep; she lay on her bed and wept, until Betty told her to shut up.
One day another nun stopped her in the corridor and said, “Sister Mary Paul would never say anything herself, Maureen, but she’s very pleased with the way you’re looking for the book. Keep looking.”
Maureen could have wept with gratitude. She wanted to kiss this nun’s hands. She kept looking, but she never found the notebook.
14
Maureen was brushing her hair. She leaned toward the mirror with a critical look that was something like her mother’s. She had been ready for school for some time and had nothing else to do: she had eaten breakfast an hour before and now the rest of them were eating, making noises at the table. She tried not to listen to them but their noises could not be shut out. At night she had to listen to them, she had to listen to his snoring. Once she had had to listen to her father’s snoring. She’d had to listen to her grandmother’s snoring—raspy, choking, vicious gasps for air, hardly human. At night she slept and woke, slept and woke, dreaming while she slept that she was awake and terrified of never being able to sleep, hearing the noises of her family eternally, never being free. There were dark shadows under her eyes, reproachful marks. She contemplated herself in the mirror critically, hearing through her tentative reflection his voice rising out in the kitchen.
“Guess I’ll go down to the garage today,” he was saying. “See what’s up. There’s…”
Maureen did not call him “Furlong,” which was his last name, and she did not call him “Pat.” There was nothing at all to call him. Loretta said she should call him “Dad” but Maureen had said nothing, having nothing to say.