Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [97]
He checks the height of the pile of printed papers against his other stack. He has to collate and staple now. Most of the time he feels like a goddamn secretary. The adding machine and the Copiograph are women’s tools — not a man’s. And he should be in the front office, not the back room. He should be making his sales.
Honora
On Friday evenings, when Sexton comes home from a week in the city, he is carrying a bag of laundry. The smell of metal is in the shirts, and sometimes it snows lint when Honora upends the clothing from the bag. On Saturday mornings, she washes the clothes against the metal rungs of the scrub board and puts them through the wringer. She hangs the clothes out to dry — six shirts, two pairs of pants, neither of which is really suitable for work in the mill (or picketing, for that matter), five pairs of underwear, and five pairs of socks. She doesn’t mind the washing, though the winter washing was the worst. The clothes froze into stiff shapes on the line, and sometimes Honora had to bring them in to warm them over the stove one by one. She worried about fire, and she minded not having money sometimes for proper soap.
Since the strike, however, the laundry has been sporadic, and she gets it done when she can. Thus it is that shortly after she has finished the lunch dishes (every bit of the bologna sandwiches and coleslaw and oatmeal cookies eaten) and has shooed Alphonse, who arrived midlunch and who followed Honora into the kitchen (like a stray animal, she thinks fondly), out of the house, she takes Sexton’s bag of dirty laundry from its place by the back door and upends it onto the porch. Nearly a week’s worth of clothing tumbles out: the shirts, the pants, the underwear, the socks, and various assorted handkerchiefs. She looks at the pile of clothing, ordinary enough, and thinks how much easier the laundry is to do since Sexton has been out of the mill.
A blot of orange catches her eye.
She bends to pick up a handkerchief. Once before, she saw a similar smear of orange on the front of a blue work shirt, and she thought at the time, insofar as she thought of it at all, that it was a spill of food from the boardinghouse — squash or turnip, possibly, or Campbell’s tomato soup. But this time, the imprint on the handkerchief is so distinctive that it cannot be mistaken for food of any sort. Honora’s fingers open, and the handkerchief floats to the floor. She puts her hand to her chest, unable to make a sound — the sort of essential nonsound she might make if confronted by a man with a gun. When at last she can breathe, she picks up the handkerchief and fingers the blot. She knows precisely what it is. She even knows the brand. Ruth Shaw used to wear it to McNiven’s on Saturday nights.
Honora walks upstairs to the bedroom and lays the handkerchief upon the bed, smoothing the corners as she does so. She sits on a chair and waits. She knows that Sexton will come. He had ink on the front of his shirt at lunch, and he will, sooner or later, want to change it for a fresh one.
She is sitting by the window when he enters the room. “What are you doing over there?” he asks, already pulling the tails of his shirt from his trousers.
The handkerchief is spread out upon the bedspread like a scarf displayed on a department store counter, the orange blot a price tag. She watches him study the handkerchief, the moment of recognition.
Of course he will feign ignorance, she thinks. He will try to bluff his way through. He is, after all, a salesman who has not entirely lost his touch.
“It’s lipstick,” she says.